Scientists have discovered three stars dancing “do-si-do” in the universe at high speed.
In fact, the stars are moving so fast that astronomers are calling it a new record: Here, a pair of stars orbit each other in less than two Earth days, while a third star orbits Run one week around them over a 25-day period. Prior to this discovery, the three fastest known star clusters were in the constellation Taurus, with the farthest star taking 33 days to orbit.
It took 68 years to break the record holder. A NASA satellite, MIT researchers, artificial intelligence, and even some amateur astronomers worked together to find the triplets, which are part of a system called TIC 290061484 in the constellation Cygnus.
Saul Rappaport, a retired MIT astronomer, said in a statement: “Discovering systems like this is exciting because they are rarely discovered, but they may be more common than current statistics suggest. .
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You can watch the star’s unique orbit in the video below:
NASA’s TESS mission (short for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) focuses on searching for new worlds as they pass in front of their host star. But the unusual trio were discovered thanks to the group’s “strobe lights”. From the telescope’s vantage point in space, the system is nearly flat, so this means that when stars cross each other in their orbits, they create eclipses. Twinkling occurs because the closer star blocks the light of the more distant star.
Amateur astronomers looking for interesting examples discovered eclipse patterns in the TESS data with the help of machine learning. The detectives first met as participants in an online citizen science project called Planet Hunters. Later, they collaborated again with professional astronomers and established the Visual Sky Survey Team, a project that lasted for more than ten years. The team’s paper detailing the unusually fast triplet is published in The Astrophysical Journal This week.
Mix and match speed of light
These three stars are more massive than the Sun, and each weighs six to eight times its weight. Based on their structure, the orbits of stars are thought to be stable for millions of years. But as they age, they eventually merge, exploding in a supernova, leaving behind a neutron star, one of the densest objects in space. This may not happen for 20 to 40 million years.
Amateur astronomers discovered these three eclipse patterns in NASA’s TESS mission data.
Image source: NASA Illustration
So far, the research team is not aware of any planets orbiting these stars. If there was one, it would probably be far away, surrounding three stars as if they were one. The triplets’ waltz through the sky is a tight one, taking place in a ballroom narrower than Mercury’s orbit around the sun.
“No one lives here,” Rappaport said. “We think stars form during the same growth process, which disrupts how tightly planets form around any star.”
Scientists say more than half of the stars in the Milky Way have one or more companion stars. These Solar systems may vary widely. Some stars have a larger hot star and a smaller cooler star, or pairs where one star cannibalizes the other. The systems discovered range from two to seven stars.
The way these groups of stars orbit each other can be extremely complex. In a six-star system, TYC 7037-89-1, three pairs orbit each other, but two of the three pairs also orbit each other. A third pair, in a wider orbit, surrounds the other two pairs.
A group of six stars possess an extremely complex set of interconnected orbits.
Image source: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center infographic
Among the newly discovered systems was another surprise. The stars are just cogs in a much larger machine. That’s right: There’s another star like it in this group of stars, making a distant cycle over the course of 3,200 days.
The team hopes to continue studying TIC 290061484 to collect more data about the fourth laggard star and capture more details about the orbits, masses, sizes and temperatures of other stars. Studying other, larger, eclipsing star systems may become easier with the advent of more advanced observatories in the future, such as the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope being developed by NASA.
“Before scientists discovered the triple eclipse star system, we had no idea they would be there,” co-author Tamas Borkovec, a research scientist at the University of Szeged in Hungary, said in a statement. “But once we found them, we thought, ‘Well, why not?'”
