NASA’s exoplanet-hunting spacecraft, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), has made a groundbreaking discovery – a record-breaking triple-star system that is so tightly bound it could fit between the Sun and Mercury. This discovery, made possible by the collaboration of professional astronomers and citizen scientists, sheds light on the formation and evolution of such rare celestial systems. Exoplanet and star system enthusiasts will find this article captivating.
Cheers For Tightest Triple-Star System Discovered
This is a prime example of the synergy between professional astronomers and citizen scientists, who found the star system TIC 290061484. Situated about 5,000 light years distant in Cygnus, the swan, this triple-star system is home to two stars that revolve around each other every 1.8 days and a third star that orbits the pair once every 25 days.
Lamba Tauri previously held the record for the tightest three-star system orbit, with its third star taking 33 days to circle around it two inner sibs: Members of the now-closed Planet Hunters project and the Visual Survey Group collaboration found this pattern among the spectra by analyzing TESS light curves with machine learning (Douglas et al. 2019, Discovery Alert #14). It also helped to pin down what makes this system’s behaviour so distinct, including the orbits, masses, sizes and temperatures of its stars.
About the Stability and Fate of TIC 290061484
The TIC 290061484 Double Star System If the artists’ rendition created by C. MacRobert & R.H.Jay GaBany is accurate, the stars in that system are nearly side by side. which helps keep the twin suns highly stable. If the orbits of stars were oriented differently, then this tidal force will destroy their resonant motion and doed to complete disruption of system. But this stability is only temporary – the researchers calculate that the system may be unstable on a timescale of, at most, a few million years.
These twin stars would then merge, causing a huge supernova blast in 20 to 40 million years when the two collapse into one. Good thing, too; chances are there aren’t any planets in stable orbits close enough to have life (as we understand it) around the stars. If the stars did form as a pair, “that would have essentially boiled off all of the material” that might otherwise coalesce into planets very near any of the stars’ surfaces, which means no “Super-Earth” or Earth-like worlds for Scholz 1. But in the TIC 290061484 system, there might still be a fourth planet, albeit very far away spinning around the three stars like they were just one.
Future of densely packed star system findings
Finding the TIC 290061484 system has led researchers wondering why even closer star systems hadn’t been previously detected. The team suspects that there are plenty more of these systems lurking throughout the Milky Way, just waiting to be found. With a hoped-for launch in late spring of 2027, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will deliver images far more detailed than those from TESS and enable observations closer to the center of our galaxy where stellar neighborhoods are dense.
The very sharp vision of Roman’s telescope will enable astronomers to resolve the faint light from star systems that normally merge into a blur and allow for the most detailed examination of the nature of these star systems in our galaxy to date. Among other tasks, Roman will focus on hundreds of millions of stars and should be able to identify the pulsating brightness that hinted at the TIC 290061484 sytem. The team is even hopeful that Roman might help scientists find closely-packed star systems with over three stars — as many as six — orbiting around each other like bees in a hive. A team member Tamás Borkovits of the Baja Observatory in Hungary put it, “Until scientists found triple stars that had three bodies eclipsing each other, astronomers saw no reason to expect that such systems would avoid the inevitable gravitational collapse. Until, that is, we came across the idea of earning more than we thought possible…. &well hell, why not be a part of it? Roman may also uncover new classes of systems and objects that will baffle astronomers, Lagrois said.
