2024-10-03 08:45:23
A team of professional and amateur astronomers, aided by artificial intelligence, have discovered a triple star system, called TIC 290061484, in which the orbit of one of the three component stars relative to the other two has a record-breaking feature. .
The team is led by Veselin Kostov of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, United States.
The observations analyzed by the team were made by NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) astronomical satellite.
The system contains a pair of twin stars that orbit each other in a complete revolution every 1.8 days, and a third star that orbits the pair in just 25 days. The discovery breaks the record for the shortest outer orbital period for this type of system, set in 1956, in which a third star orbits an inner pair taking 33 days to make a complete revolution.
Subtle but suspicious brightness oscillations in the starlight received by the system helped uncover the nature of the trio, located in the constellation Cygnus. The system is almost flat from Earth’s visual perspective. This means that the stars pass each other (eclipse each other) as they orbit. When this happens, the star closest to us blocks some of the light from the farthest star.
Using machine learning (a form of artificial intelligence), Kostov and his collaborators combed through massive starlight data sets captured by TESS to identify potentially eclipse-revealing dimming patterns. The researchers then directly examined the most suspicious data, leading to the discovery of TIC 290061484 and its record-breaking characteristics.
The discovered trio is quite stable in terms of orbits. This is partly due to the fact that their stars orbit in almost the same plane. This stability is surprising, because it is not likely to exist in star systems whose members orbit so close to each other. It must be taken into account that the orbits of the trio occupy a smaller area than that between the Sun and the orbit of Mercury.
Graphical representation of how closely packed the three stars of TIC 290061484 are If they were located at the center of our solar system, all the stars’ orbits would be contained in a space smaller than that between the Sun and Mercury’s orbit around it. it. The sizes of the three stars and the Sun are also to scale. (Image: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)
However, even if the orbits of the three stars remain stable for millions of years, no planet could exist in the area occupied by those suns. Everything indicates that the stars formed together from the same growth process, which would necessarily have prevented the formation of planets near any of the stars. The exception might be some distant planet orbiting the three stars as if they were one.
As the trio’s innermost stars age, they will expand and eventually merge, triggering a supernova explosion. This catastrophe is estimated to occur 20 to 40 million years from now.
This pioneering study of TIC 290061484 is titled “TIC 290061484: A Triply Eclipsing Triple System with the Shortest Known Outer Period of 24.5 Days.” And it was published in the academic journal The Astrophysical Journal. (Fountain: NCYT by Amazings)
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