Multiple Stars News Today

Albireo is a wide double star, but may actually be a binary, or a trinary, and maybe a black hole is there too.

Zoom In An artist’s map of the Milky Way galaxy, with a circle 3,000 light years in radius centered on the Sun. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Robert Hurt (SSC-Caltech) / Phil Plait (annotation) Gaia is a European Space Agency mission that orbits the Sun in a stable position about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. Its mission is to measure the positions, motions, colors, and other characteristics of over nearly two billion stars in the galaxy. Thats it. It doesnt specify what kind of star to ...

Multiple stars are just intrinsically cool: Unlike our Sun, sailing alone through space, multiples are where two or more stars orbit each other in a stable, gravitationally bound system. Half the stars in the galaxy are in multiple systems like that. Most are binaries (two stars orbiting each other) and some in trinaries (three stars). Fewer yet are in higher-order systems. Thats the first thing that makes TYC 7037-89-1 special: Its a sextuplet, a six-star system. Its a little over 1,900 light ...