\n<\/p>\n
\n<\/iframe>\n<\/p><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Watch how the three stars in the system called TIC 290061484 eclipse each other over about 75 days. The line at the bottom is the plot of the system\u2019s brightness over time, as seen by TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite). The inset shows the system from above.<br \/><strong>NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Professional and amateur astronomers teamed up with artificial intelligence to find an unmatched stellar trio called TIC 290061484, thanks to cosmic \u201cstrobe lights\u201d captured by NASA\u2019s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite).\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The system contains a set of twin stars orbiting each other every 1.8 days, and a third star that circles the pair in just 25 days. The discovery smashes the record for shortest outer orbital period for this type of system, set in 1956, which had a third star orbiting an inner pair in 33 days.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThanks to the compact, edge-on configuration of the system, we can measure the orbits, masses, sizes, and temperatures of its stars,\u201d said Veselin Kostov, a research scientist at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. \u201cAnd we can study how the system formed and predict how it may evolve.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>A paper, led by Kostov, describing the results was published in The Astrophysical Journal Oct. 2.<\/p>\n<p>Flickers in starlight helped reveal the tight trio, which is located in the constellation Cygnus. The system happens to be almost flat from our perspective. This means the stars each cross right in front of, or eclipse, each other as they orbit. When that happens, the nearer star blocks some of the farther star\u2019s light.<\/p>\n<p>Using machine learning, scientists filtered through enormous sets of starlight data from TESS to identify patterns of dimming that reveal eclipses. Then, a small team of citizen scientists filtered further, relying on years of experience and informal training to find particularly interesting cases.<\/p>\n<p>These amateur astronomers, who are co-authors on the new study, met as participants in an online citizen science project called Planet Hunters, which was active from 2010 to 2013. The volunteers later teamed up with professional astronomers to create a new collaboration called the Visual Survey Group, which has been active for over a decade.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019re mainly looking for signatures of compact multi-star systems, unusual pulsating stars in binary systems, and weird objects,\u201d said Saul Rappaport, an emeritus professor of physics at MIT in Cambridge. Rappaport co-authored the paper and has helped lead the Visual Survey Group for more than a decade. \u201cIt\u2019s exciting to identify a system like this because they\u2019re rarely found, but they may be more common than current tallies suggest.\u201d Many more likely speckle our galaxy, waiting to be discovered.<\/p>\n<p>Partly because the stars in the newfound system orbit in nearly the same plane, scientists say it\u2019s likely very stable despite their tight configuration (the trio\u2019s orbits fit within a smaller area than Mercury\u2019s orbit around the Sun). Each star\u2019s gravity doesn\u2019t perturb the others too much, like they could if their orbits were tilted in different directions.<\/p>\n<p>But while their orbits will likely remain stable for millions of years, \u201cno one lives here,\u201d Rappaport said. \u201cWe think the stars formed together from the same growth process, which would have disrupted planets from forming very closely around any of the stars.\u201d The exception could be a distant planet orbiting the three stars as if they were one.<\/p>\n<p>As the inner stars age, they will expand and ultimately merge, triggering a supernova explosion in around 20 to 40 million years.<\/p>\n<p>In the meantime, astronomers are hunting for triple stars with even shorter orbits. That\u2019s hard to do with current technology, but a new tool is on the way.<\/p>\n<p>Images from NASA\u2019s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be much more detailed than TESS\u2019s. The same area of the sky covered by a single TESS pixel will fit more than 36,000 Roman pixels. And while TESS took a wide, shallow look at the entire sky, Roman will pierce deep into the heart of our galaxy where stars crowd together, providing a core sample rather than skimming the whole surface.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe don\u2019t know much about a lot of the stars in the center of the galaxy except for the brightest ones,\u201d said Brian Powell, a co-author and data scientist at Goddard. \u201cRoman\u2019s high-resolution view will help us measure light from stars that usually blur together, providing the best look yet at the nature of star systems in our galaxy.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>And since Roman will monitor light from hundreds of millions of stars as part of one of its main surveys, it will help astronomers find more triple star systems in which all the stars eclipse each other.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019re curious why we haven\u2019t found star systems like these with even shorter outer orbital periods,\u201d said Powell. \u201cRoman should help us find them and bring us closer to figuring out what their limits might be.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Roman could also find eclipsing stars bound together in even larger groups \u2014 half a dozen, or perhaps even more all orbiting each other like bees buzzing around a hive.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBefore scientists discovered triply eclipsing triple star systems, we didn\u2019t expect them to be out there,\u201d said co-author Tam\u00e1s Borkovits, a senior research fellow at the Baja Observatory of The University of Szeged in Hungary. \u201cBut once we found them, we thought, well why not? Roman, too, may reveal never-before-seen categories of systems and objects that will surprise astronomers.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><em>TESS is a NASA Astrophysics Explorer mission managed by NASA Goddard and operated by MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Additional partners include Northrop Grumman, based in Falls Church, Virginia; NASA\u2019s Ames Research Center in California\u2019s Silicon Valley; the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts; MIT\u2019s Lincoln Laboratory; and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. More than a dozen universities, research institutes, and observatories worldwide are participants in the mission.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>NASA\u2019s citizen science projects are collaborations between scientists and interested members of the public\u00a0and do not require U.S. citizenship. Through these collaborations, volunteers (known as citizen scientists) have helped make thousands of important scientific discoveries. To get involved with a project,\u00a0<em>visit NASA\u2019s Citizen Science page.<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n<p>Download additional images and video from NASA\u2019s Scientific Visualization Studio.<\/p>\n<p><strong><em>By Ashley Balzer<br \/><\/em><\/strong><em><strong>NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center<\/strong><\/em><strong><em>, Greenbelt, Md.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Media Contact:<br \/>Claire Andreoli<br \/>301-286-1940<br \/><em><strong>claire.andreoli@nasa.gov<\/strong><\/em><strong><em><br \/>NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nasa.gov\/missions\/tess\/nasas-tess-spots-record-breaking-stellar-triplets\/?rand=772114\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Watch how the three stars in the system called TIC 290061484 eclipse each other over about 75 days. The line at the bottom is the plot of the system\u2019s brightness… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":789846,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-789845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-NASA"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=789845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789845\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/789846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=789845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=789845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=789845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}