From star-destroying black holes to exploding comets, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, has seen its share of surprises since it began searching for exoplanets in the galaxy in 2018. -Years away are possibly all the discoveries for his greatness in science fiction.
The source, called TIC 168789840, is a six-star system. This alone makes it a rarity, but what makes this sex toy even more remarkable is that they consist of three pairs of binary stars: three different star couplets orbiting three different mass centers, but with the trio gravitationally linked to each other and circle. the galactic center as a single galaxy. Although a handful of other six-star systems have been discovered, this one is unique: it is the first in which the stars in each of the three pairings pass in front of and behind each other, obscuring the other member of its star dance group. , at least from our line of sight’s space telescope.
In other words, scientists have found a sextuply death system that obscures. The discovery, posted online this month, was accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal.
Exoplanets inside the star cluster have not yet been confirmed, but if you live in a world inside, the night sky would be something special, said Tamás Borkovits, an astronomer at the Baja Astronomical Observatory in Hungary and co-author. Any inhabitant of these worlds, “could see two suns, just like Luke Skywalker on Tatooine,” said dr. Borkovits said, as well as four other very bright stars dancing around the sky.
But only one of the pairs could have any planets. Two of the system’s binaries revolve very close together and form their own quadruple subsystem. Any planets there are likely to be ejected or swallowed by one of the four stars. The third binary is further out and orbits the other two once every 2000 years, making it a possible exoplanetary refuge.
Exotic star collections like these do not just look cool. It refines and disputes our understanding of how multiple galaxies form, said Patricia Cruz, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrobiology in Madrid, who was not involved in the work.
The depth and duration of the eclipses of TIC 168789840 allow astronomers to determine the dimensions, mass and relative temperature of its stars – important information that can be crammed into models of star formation. But even with these clues, the origins of this swirling six-star system will remain a mystery until we find others of it.
“The system exists against chance,” said Brian Powell, a computer scientist at NASA’s High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center in Greenbelt, MD, and lead author of the study.
NASA’s TESS satellite searches for exoplanets by looking for temporary declines in a star’s light, caused by a planet orbiting from our perspective. But according to dr. Cruz, scientists originally used the same light blocking principle with other telescopes to explore stars that obscure other stars.
Using this concept, Mr. Powell, along with Veselin Kostov, an astrophysicist at the SETI Institute, designed a neural network that could identify obscure binary stars using TESS data.
The neural network studied an archive of nearly 80 million records of light intensity changes, far more than humans could handle alone. “What machine learning can do is take this uncompromising data set and turn it into something one can work with,” he said. Powell said. It found a multitude of multiple galaxies, including the superlative TIC 168789840 in March last year.
Late last year, the data was transferred to “hawkish and very enthusiastic” professional and amateur astronomers around the world, said dr. Borkovits said. Their efforts confirmed that TIC 168789840 was a sextile system that helped explain the stars’ properties, orbital dimensions, and paths.
Andrei Tokovinin, an astronomer at the Inter-American Observatory Cerro Tololo in La Serena, Chile, and co-author of the study, proposes an explanation of how the system came into being: Three stars formed in a vast gas cloud is, which all revolve around each other in a three-star system. Later, they encountered a dense clump of gas from the same cloud. This encounter resulted in discs forming stars around the original trio, which eventually gave smaller companions.
It is worth trying to unravel its origins. But for mr. Powell is rewarding enough to ‘work with literally the most interesting data in the universe’ to find this strange sex duplicate.
“Just the fact that it exists strikes me,” he said. “I just want to be in a spaceship, park next to this thing and see it in person.”