Scientists have spotted a record-breaking triple-star system using the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a NASA spacecraft that hunts for exoplanets. The system’s orbit is so tightly bound that it could easily fit between the sun and Mercury.
The newly discovered triple-star system has been designated as TIC 290061484. It is located about 5,000 light-years away in Cygnus, the swan constellation.
The system contains two stars that circle each other once every 1.8 Earth days and a third star that orbits the pair once every 25 Earth days.
It is the tightest orbit of a triple-star system that has ever been found. Previously, the record-holder for the tightest triple-star system orbit was Lamba Tauri. It set the record in 1956, with its third star taking 33 days to go around its inner twin stars.
A team of citizen scientists and professional astronomers who came together to form the Visual Survey Group were responsible for the discovery. The group has been in operation for over a decade.
“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 from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the SETI Institute. “We can study how the system formed and predict how it may evolve.”
Since the stars of TIC 290061484 orbit each other in almost the same plane, the team believes the system is highly stable.
If the stars’ orbits were tilted in different directions, their orbits would be disrupted by each other’s gravitational pulls, which would make the system unstable.
Its stability will only last a few million years, though. As the inner twin stars of the triple-star system get older, they will expand outward and eventually merge.
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