NASA Space Telescope Spots Record-Breaking Triple Star System

As the name implies, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) was designed to spot exoplanets, but it’s flexible. A team of professional and amateur astronomers have used the planet hunter to identify an unusual triple star system known as TIC 290061484. The remarkably close orbit of these celestial objects produced a strobing effect that stood out to TESS, breaking a record that has stood for almost 70 years.
Triple star systems can have mind-bending physics. All three objects orbit the system’s center of mass, which usually results in a tight binary pair and the third star in a wider orbit by itself. That describes Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth. It takes about 550,000 years to complete an orbit around the Alpha Centauri AB pair, but the newly discovered system is a much more compact version of this arrangement.
The newly published research in The Astrophysical Journal reveals the orbital period of the outer star in TIC 290061484 is a mere 25 days. This breaks the record previously set in 1956 with the mapping of the Lambda Tauri system. It takes 33 days for that star to complete an orbit around the central pair.
TESS is a space telescope with four wide-angle cameras. As it orbits Earth, the spacecraft watches large sections of the sky and tracks stellar brightness. When an exoplanet passes in front of its star, there is a small dip in brightness that repeats at regular intervals. The team used machine learning to sift through the massive TESS data set, looking for flickering that could point to compact multi-star systems. After narrowing down the search, citizen scientists filtered it further to point the way to TIC 290061484.
“Thanks to the compact, edge-on configuration of the system, we can measure the orbits, masses, sizes, and temperatures of its stars,” said Veselin Kostov, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The transits produced a strobing effect in the TESS data, as opposed to the brightness drops seen when exoplanets transit a star.
The team says they don’t expect the exoplanet hunter to see any exoplanets in the TIC 290061484 system—the extremely close orbits most likely disrupted planetary formation. Any worlds that did exist wouldn’t survive long in the grand scheme, either. As the central pair of stars age, they will expand and merge, triggering a supernova in 20 to 40 million years that blows all three stars to cosmic smithereens.
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