Astronomers Discover Quintuple Star System

[n2doc]

This star system, known as 1SWASP J093010.78+533859.5 (J093010 for short) or TYC 3807-759-1, is located 115 light-years from Earth in the constellation Ursa Major.

It was originally detected in 2006 in archived data from the SuperWASP project, which uses small cameras at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands, and at the Sutherland Station of the South African Astronomical Observatory, to image almost the whole sky every few minutes.

Over years, its measurements of the brightness of individual stars have been assembled into light curves for 30 million sources in our Milky Way Galaxy.

The light curve of J093010 initially revealed the presence of a contact eclipsing binary – a system in which the two stars are orbiting so close together that they share an outer atmosphere. Contact binaries are quite common, but this particular system is notable because its orbital period – the time the two stars take to complete one orbital cycle – is so short, just under 6 hours.


more

http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/science-quintuple-star-system-02994.html

[Thor_MN]

1. wow

“This is a truly exotic star system. In principle there’s no reason it couldn’t have planets in orbit around each of the pairs of stars. Any inhabitants would have a sky that would put the makers of Star Wars to shame,”


Would a planet around a contact binary star have a wobble in it's orbit? Or would it just orbit the center of mass of its stars?

[2naSalit]

2. Wow!! nt

[eppur_se_muova]

3. Just for the record -- there are other quintuple, sextuple, and septuple systems known.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_system#Examples

Oh, and the obligatory literary reference:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightfall_%28Asimov_short_story_and_novel%29

[denbot]

4. I wonder if there could be a Lagrangian point at the center of the system.

If so with all those stars, could a planet there be in the "Goldilocks" zone?

[tomm2thumbs]

5. maybe

we live in an intergalactic lava lamp