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. 2023 Mar 1;616(7957):448–451. doi: 10.1038/s41586-023-05805-2

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© The Author(s) 2023

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Fig. 1 — We determine the new orbital period of Dimorphos using the times of mutual events, when a measurable decrease in the system brightness occurs because of an eclipse or occultation. Due to the geometry of the Didymos system during this time period, our lightcurve observations include primary eclipses (left), time outside mutual events (centre) and secondary eclipses (right). These diagrams simulate the view of the system from Earth on 10 October 06:09 (primary eclipse), 10 October 08:47 (outside events) and 10 October 12:06 (secondary eclipse) in geocentric UTC. The primary eclipses observed throughout our post-impact dataset are grazing, which resulted in a subtle decrease in system brightness (Fig. 3). During the secondary eclipse, Dimorphos is completely shadowed.