NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) captured an interesting image of stellar triplets, known as TIC 290061484, in the Cygnus constellation. That’s right, this system has a pair of twin stars orbiting each other every 1.8 days, while a third star that circles the pair in a mere 25 days.
If the stellar triplets were located at the center of our solar system, all the stars’ orbits would be contained a space smaller than Mercury’s orbit around the Sun. The image above shows the sizes of the triplet stars and the Sun to scale. Astronomers used machine learning to filter through enormous sets of starlight data from TESS to identify patterns of dimming that reveal eclipses. A group of citizen scientists then filtered further, relying on years of experience and informal training to find particularly interesting cases.
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Thanks to the compact, edge-on configuration of the system, we can measure the orbits, masses, sizes, and temperatures of its stars. And we can study how the system formed and predict how it may evolve,” said Veselin Kostov, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.
