“It is the first of its sort to have ever been discovered, as far as we know. There are a lot of tertiary star systems (systems with three stars) that we are aware of, although they are usually much less massive.” According to Alejandro Vigna-Gomez, corresponding author of the work and postdoc at the Niels Bohr International Academy, “the massive stars in this triple are quite close to one another – it is a compact system”.
Detailed Analysis:
At the system’s centre, a binary pair of two stars is circling each other, and their combined mass is twelve times that of the sun. The orbital period of the binary is also about equivalent to one day on Earth. Much while it appears as though the binary at the centre is made up of some huge stars, the tertiary star is even more enormous because it has a mass that is roughly 16 times that of the Sun.
The binary pair’s inner orbit is circular, and the tertiary star orbits the system nearly six times annually. When you take into account the size of the stars in the system, this is pretty rapid. When the extremely bright system was first discovered, it was previously believed to be only a star binary.
Why is it so ?
However, a group of amateur astronomers discovered something unexpected while reviewing a piece of open data from NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) telescope. What was previously believed to be two stars turned out to be three stars because they noticed some irregularities in the detection.
The researchers investigated various hypotheses regarding how the system might have developed. They also got to the conclusion that there may have been two initial binary systems that formed before one of the binary systems combined to generate the big tertiary star after running over 100,000 computer simulations.
Featured Image: cnet.com
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