There is a triple star system that has never been seen before. The stellar triplets used to have a fourth sibling before one of them devoured it.
The triple, or tertiary, star system was detected by researchers using data from the TESS observatory. A pair of stars circle one another at the center of the system while a third star is in the middle.
NASA says that 10% of star systems in the universe could be tertiary. Astronomers found a single exoplanet in a tertiary system for the first time in September of 2021.
TIC is a different system because of its size and shape. The stars are much more massive than the typical stars found in a tertiary system, which means they are much more compact.
Scientists determined that the alien planet with 3 stars is actually a star.
Alejandro Vigna-Gomez said in a statement that it was the first of its kind ever detected.
It takes just over a day for the two stars at the center of TIC to circle each other. Vigna-Gomez said that the larger star is about as big as 16 suns and it circles the pair once every 52 days.
A citizen scientist discovered the new system after combing through the TESS database to find anomalies. The amateur astronomer found the star system to be very bright due to the fact that there were three stars instead of one. The researchers later realized that it was a tertiary system. The team was trying to figure out how the system might have formed after they discovered how big the stars were.
There are three possible explanations for the creation of TIC There is a chance that the large outer star formed first. The most unlikely explanation is that the star ejected or absorbed the gas needed to form new stars. The second option is that the three stars formed seperately and began to form a circle around each other. The massive outer star would likely end up at the center of the system, making this unlikely.
One of the explanations is that the system was made up of two pairs, one at the center of the system and another at the outer star. Researchers think that the outer pair underwent a stellar merger to create a giant star.
The massive size and compactness of the stars was explained by this third explanation.
Researchers want to find similar tertiary systems. "What we really want to know is if this kind of system is common in our universe," Bin Liu said in the statement. There may be more compact systems in the data.
The study was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
It was originally published on Live Science
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