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Hubble Space Telescope Home NASA’s Hubble Sees a… Hubble Space Telescope Hubble Home Overview About Hubble The History of Hubble Hubble Timeline Why Have a Telescope in Space? Hubble by the Numbers At the Museum FAQs Impact & Benefits Hubble’s Impact & Benefits Science Impacts Cultural Impact Technology Benefits Impact on Human Spaceflight Astro Community Impacts Science Hubble Science Science Themes Science Highlights Science Behind Discoveries Hubble’s Partners in Science Universe Uncovered Explore the Night Sky Observatory Hubble Observatory Hubble Design Mission Operations Missions to Hubble Hubble vs Webb Team Hubble Team Career Aspirations Hubble Astronauts News Hubble News Hubble News Archive Social Media Media Resources Multimedia Multimedia Images Videos Sonifications Podcasts E-books Lithographs Fact Sheets Glossary Posters Hubble on the NASA App More Online Activities 3 Min Read NASA’s Hubble Sees a Stellar Volcano
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captures a spectacular view the star R Aquarii. Credits:
NASA, ESA, Matthias Stute , Margarita Karovska , Davide De Martin (ESA/Hubble), Mahdi Zamani (ESA/Hubble) NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has provided a dramatic and colorful close-up look at one of the most rambunctious stars in our galaxy, weaving a huge spiral pattern among the stars.
Located approximately 700 light-years away, a binary star system called R Aquarii undergoes violent eruptions that blast out huge filaments of glowing gas. The twisted stellar outflows make the region look like a lawn sprinkler gone berserk. This dramatically demonstrates how the universe redistributes the products of nuclear energy that form deep inside stars and jet back into space.
R Aquarii belongs to a class of double stars called symbiotic stars. The primary star is an aging red giant and its companion is a compact burned-out star known as a white dwarf. The red giant primary star is classified as a Mira variable that is over 400 times larger than our Sun. The bloated monster star pulsates, changes temperature, and varies in brightness by a factor of 750 times over a roughly 390-day period. At its peak the star is blinding at nearly 5,000 times our Sun’s brightness.
This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image features the binary star system R Aquarii. NASA, ESA, Matthias Stute , Margarita Karovska , Davide De Martin (ESA/Hubble), Mahdi Zamani (ESA/Hubble) When the white dwarf star swings closest to the red giant along its 44-year orbital period, it gravitationally siphons off hydrogen gas. This material accumulates on the dwarf star’s surface until it undergoes spontaneous nuclear fusion, making that surface explode like a gigantic hydrogen bomb. After the outburst, the fueling cycle begins again.
This outburst ejects geyser-like filaments shooting out from the core, forming weird loops and trails as the plasma emerges in streamers. The plasma is twisted by the force of the explosion and channeled upwards and outwards by strong magnetic fields. The outflow appears to bend back on itself into a spiral pattern. The plasma is shooting into space over 1 million miles per hour – fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in 15 minutes! The filaments are glowing in visible light because they are energized by blistering radiation from the stellar duo.
Hubble first observed the star in 1990. R Aquarii was resolved into two very bright stars separated by about 1.6 billion miles. The ESA/Hubble team now has made a unique timelapse of R Aquarii’s dynamic behavior, from observations spanning from 2014 to 2023. Across the five images, the rapid and dramatic evolution of the binary star and its surrounding nebula can be seen. The binary star dims and brightens due to strong pulsations in the red giant star.
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This video features five frames spanning from 2014 to 2023 of R Aquarii. These frames show the brightness of the central binary changing over time due to strong pulsations in the red giant star. The central structures spiral outward due to their interaction with material previously ejected by the binary. This timelapse highlights the value of Hubble’s high resolution optical observations in the changing universe, known as time-domain astronomy. NASA, ESA, Matthias Stute , Margarita Karovska , Davide De Martin , Mahdi Zamani , N. Bartmann (ESA/Hubble) The scale of the event is extraordinary even in astronomical terms. Space-blasted material can be traced out to at least 248 billion miles from the stars, or 24 times our solar system’s diameter. Images like these and more from Hubble are expected to revolutionize our ideas about such unique stellar “volcanoes” as R Aquarii.
The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for over three decades and continues to make ground-breaking discoveries that shape our fundamental understanding of the universe. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope and mission operations. Lockheed Martin Space, based in Denver, Colorado, also supports mission operations at Goddard. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, conducts Hubble science operations for NASA.
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Last Updated Oct 16, 2024 Editor Andrea Gianopoulos Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
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Hubble Space Telescope
Since its 1990 launch, the Hubble Space Telescope has changed our fundamental understanding of the universe.
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Hubble Space Telescope Home NASA’s Hubble, New… Hubble Space Telescope Hubble Home Overview About Hubble The History of Hubble Hubble Timeline Why Have a Telescope in Space? Hubble by the Numbers At the Museum FAQs Impact & Benefits Hubble’s Impact & Benefits Science Impacts Cultural Impact Technology Benefits Impact on Human Spaceflight Astro Community Impacts Science Hubble Science Science Themes Science Highlights Science Behind Discoveries Hubble’s Partners in Science Universe Uncovered Explore the Night Sky Observatory Hubble Observatory Hubble Design Mission Operations Missions to Hubble Hubble vs Webb Team Hubble Team Career Aspirations Hubble Astronauts News Hubble News Hubble News Archive Social Media Media Resources Multimedia Multimedia Images Videos Sonifications Podcasts E-books Lithographs Fact Sheets Glossary Posters Hubble on the NASA App More Online Activities 6 min read
NASA’s Hubble, New Horizons Team Up for a Simultaneous Look at Uranus
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (left) and NASA’s New Horizon’s spacecraft (right) images the planet Uranus. NASA, ESA, STScI, Samantha Hasler (MIT), Amy Simon (NASA-GSFC), New Horizons Planetary Science Theme Team; Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Joseph Olmsted (STScI)
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NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and New Horizons spacecraft simultaneously set their sights on Uranus recently, allowing scientists to make a direct comparison of the planet from two very different viewpoints. The results inform future plans to study like types of planets around other stars.
Astronomers used Uranus as a proxy for similar planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets, comparing high-resolution images from Hubble to the more-distant view from New Horizons. This combined perspective will help scientists learn more about what to expect while imaging planets around other stars with future telescopes.
“While we expected Uranus to appear differently in each filter of the observations, we found that Uranus was actually dimmer than predicted in the New Horizons data taken from a different viewpoint,” said lead author Samantha Hasler of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and New Horizons science team collaborator.
In this image, two three-dimensional shapes (top) of Uranus are compared to the actual views of the planet from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (bottom left) and NASA’s New Horizon’s spacecraft (bottom right). Comparing high-resolution images from Hubble to the smaller view from New Horizons offers a combined perspective that will help researchers learn more about what to expect while imaging planets around other stars with future observatories. NASA, ESA, STScI, Samantha Hasler (MIT), Amy Simon (NASA-GSFC), New Horizons Planetary Science Theme Team; Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Joseph Olmsted (STScI)
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Direct imaging of exoplanets is a key technique for learning about their potential habitability, and offers new clues to the origin and formation of our own solar system. Astronomers use both direct imaging and spectroscopy to collect light from the observed planet and compare its brightness at different wavelengths. However, imaging exoplanets is a notoriously difficult process because they’re so far away. Their images are mere pinpoints and so are not as detailed as the close-up views that we have of worlds orbiting our Sun. Researchers can also only directly image exoplanets at “partial phases,” when only a portion of the planet is illuminated by their star as seen from Earth.
Uranus was an ideal target as a test for understanding future distant observations of exoplanets by other telescopes for a few reasons. First, many known exoplanets are also gas giants similar in nature. Also, at the time of the observations, New Horizons was on the far side of Uranus, 6.5 billion miles away, allowing its twilight crescent to be studied—something that cannot be done from Earth. At that distance, the New Horizons view of the planet was just several pixels in its color camera, called the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera.
On the other hand, Hubble, with its high resolution, and in its low-Earth orbit 1.7 billion miles away from Uranus, was able to see atmospheric features such as clouds and storms on the day side of the gaseous world.
“Uranus appears as just a small dot on the New Horizons observations, similar to the dots seen of directly-imaged exoplanets from observatories like Webb or ground-based observatories,” added Hasler. “Hubble provides context for what the atmosphere is doing when it was observed with New Horizons.”
The gas giant planets in our solar system have dynamic and variable atmospheres with changing cloud cover. How common is this among exoplanets? By knowing the details of what the clouds on Uranus looked like from Hubble, researchers are able to verify what is interpreted from the New Horizons data. In the case of Uranus, both Hubble and New Horizons saw that the brightness did not vary as the planet rotated, which indicates that the cloud features were not changing with the planet’s rotation.
However, the importance of the detection by New Horizons has to do with how the planet reflects light at a different phase than what Hubble, or other observatories on or near Earth, can see. New Horizons showed that exoplanets may be dimmer than predicted at partial and high phase angles, and that the atmosphere reflects light differently at partial phase.
NASA has two major upcoming observatories in the works to advance studies of exoplanet atmospheres and potential habitability.
“These landmark New Horizons studies of Uranus from a vantage point unobservable by any other means add to the mission’s treasure trove of new scientific knowledge, and have, like many other datasets obtained in the mission, yielded surprising new insights into the worlds of our solar system,” added New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute.
This illustration shows NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft’s view of our solar system from deep in the Kuiper Belt. New Horizons is currently at an estimated distance of more than 5 billion miles from Earth. The probe was 6.5 billion miles away from Uranus when it recently observed the planet. In this study, researchers used the gas giant as an exoplanet proxy, comparing high-resolution images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to the smaller view from New Horizons to learn more about what to expect while imaging planets around other stars. NASA, ESA, Christian Nieves (STScI), Ralf Crawford (STScI), Greg Bacon (STScI)
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NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, set to launch by 2027, will use a coronagraph to block out a star’s light to directly see gas giant exoplanets. NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory, in an early planning phase, will be the first telescope designed specifically to search for atmospheric biosignatures on Earth-sized, rocky planets orbiting other stars.
“Studying how known benchmarks like Uranus appear in distant imaging can help us have more robust expectations when preparing for these future missions,” concluded Hasler. “And that will be critical to our success.”
Launched in January 2006, New Horizons made the historic flyby of Pluto and its moons in July 2015, before giving humankind its first close-up look at one of these planetary building block and Kuiper Belt object, Arrokoth, in January 2019. New Horizons is now in its second extended mission, studying distant Kuiper Belt objects, characterizing the outer heliosphere of the Sun, and making important astrophysical observations from its unmatched vantage point in distant regions of the solar system.
The Uranus results are being presented this week at the 56th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences, in Boise, Idaho.
The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for over three decades and continues to make ground-breaking discoveries that shape our fundamental understanding of the universe. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope and mission operations. Lockheed Martin Space, based in Denver, Colorado, also supports mission operations at Goddard. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, conducts Hubble science operations for NASA.
The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. Southwest Research Institute, based in San Antonio and Boulder, Colorado, directs the mission via Principal Investigator Alan Stern and leads the science team, payload operations and encounter science planning. New Horizons is part of NASA’s New Frontiers program, managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA
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Last Updated Oct 09, 2024 Editor Andrea Gianopoulos Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
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Hubble Space Telescope
Since its 1990 launch, the Hubble Space Telescope has changed our fundamental understanding of the universe.
New Horizons
New Horizons was the first spacecraft to explore Pluto and its five moons up close and, later, made the first…
Studying the Outer Planets and Moons
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Hubble Space Telescope Home NASA’s Hubble Watches… Missions Hubble Home Overview About Hubble The History of Hubble Hubble Timeline Why Have a Telescope in Space? Hubble by the Numbers At the Museum FAQs Impact & Benefits Hubble’s Impact & Benefits Science Impacts Cultural Impact Technology Benefits Impact on Human Spaceflight Astro Community Impacts Science Hubble Science Science Themes Science Highlights Science Behind Discoveries Hubble’s Partners in Science Universe Uncovered Explore the Night Sky Observatory Hubble Observatory Hubble Design Mission Operations Missions to Hubble Hubble vs Webb Team Hubble Team Career Aspirations Hubble Astronauts News Hubble News Hubble News Archive Social Media Media Resources Multimedia Multimedia Images Videos Sonifications Podcasts E-books Lithographs Fact Sheets Glossary Posters Hubble on the NASA App More Online Activities 4 Min Read NASA’s Hubble Watches Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Behave Like a Stress Ball
Hubble Space Telescope data of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot spanning approximately 90 days. Credits:
NASA, ESA, Amy Simon (NASA-GSFC); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI) Astronomers have observed Jupiter’s legendary Great Red Spot (GRS), an anticyclone large enough to swallow Earth, for at least 150 years. But there are always new surprises – especially when NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope takes a close-up look at it.
Hubble’s new observations of the famous red storm, collected 90 days between December 2023 to March 2024, reveal that the GRS is not as stable as it might look. The recent data show the GRS jiggling like a bowl of gelatin. The combined Hubble images allowed astronomers to assemble a time-lapse movie of the squiggly behavior of the GRS.
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This time-lapse movie is assembled from Hubble Space Telescope observations spanning approximately 90 days (between December 2023 and March 2024) when the giant planet Jupiter ranged from 391 million to 512 million miles from the Sun. Astronomers measured the Great Red Spot’s size, shape, brightness, color, and vorticity over a full oscillation cycle. The data reveal that the Great Red Spot is not as stable as it might look. It was observed going through an oscillation in its elliptical shape, jiggling like a bowl of gelatin. The cause of the 90-day oscillation is unknown. NASA, ESA, Amy Simon (NASA-GSFC); Video: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
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“While we knew its motion varies slightly in its longitude, we didn’t expect to see the size oscillate. As far as we know, it’s not been identified before,” said Amy Simon of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, lead author of the science paper published in The Planetary Science Journal. “This is really the first time we’ve had the proper imaging cadence of the GRS. With Hubble’s high resolution we can say that the GRS is definitively squeezing in and out at the same time as it moves faster and slower. That was very unexpected, and at present there are no hydrodynamic explanations.”
Hubble monitors Jupiter and the other outer solar system planets every year through the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy program (OPAL) led by Simon, but these observations were from a program dedicated to the GRS. Understanding the mechanisms of the largest storms in the solar system puts the theory of hurricanes on Earth into a broader cosmic context, which might be applied to better understanding the meteorology on planets around other stars.
Using Hubble Space Telescope data spanning approximately 90 days (between December 2023 and March 2024) when the giant planet Jupiter ranged from 391 million to 512 million miles from the Sun, astronomers measured the Great Red Spot’s size, shape, brightness, color, and vorticity over one full oscillation cycle. The data reveal that the Great Red Spot is not as stable as it might look. It was observed going through an oscillation in its elliptical shape, jiggling like a bowl of gelatin. The cause of the 90-day oscillation is unknown. NASA, ESA, Amy Simon (NASA-GSFC); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
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Simon’s team used Hubble to zoom in on the GRS for a detailed look at its size, shape, and any subtle color changes. “When we look closely, we see a lot of things are changing from day to day,” said Simon. This includes ultraviolet-light observations showing that the distinct core of the storm gets brightest when the GRS is at its largest size in its oscillation cycle. This indicates less haze absorption in the upper atmosphere.
“As it accelerates and decelerates, the GRS is pushing against the windy jet streams to the north and south of it,” said co-investigator Mike Wong of the University of California at Berkeley. “It’s similar to a sandwich where the slices of bread are forced to bulge out when there’s too much filling in the middle.” Wong contrasted this to Neptune, where dark spots can drift wildly in latitude without strong jet streams to hold them in place. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot has been held at a southern latitude, trapped between the jet streams, for the extent of Earth-bound telescopic observations.
Using Hubble Space Telescope data spanning approximately 90 days (between December 2023 and March 2024) when the giant planet Jupiter ranged from 391 million to 512 million miles from the Sun, astronomers measured the Great Red Spot’s size, shape, brightness, color, and vorticity over a full oscillation cycle. The data reveal that the Great Red Spot is not as stable as it might look. It was observed going through an oscillation in its elliptical shape, jiggling like a bowl of gelatin. The cause of the 90-day oscillation is unknown. The observation is part of the observing programs led by Amy Simon of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. NASA, ESA, STScI, Amy Simon (NASA-GSFC); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
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The team has continued watching the GRS shrink since the OPAL program began 10 years ago. They predict it will keep shrinking before taking on a stable, less-elongated, shape. “Right now it’s over-filling its latitude band relative to the wind field. Once it shrinks inside that band the winds will really be holding it in place,” said Simon. The team predicts that the GRS will probably stabilize in size, but for now Hubble only observed it for one oscillation cycle.
The researchers hope that in the future other high-resolution images from Hubble might identify other Jovian parameters that indicate the underlying cause of the oscillation.
The results are being presented at the 56th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences, in Boise, Idaho.
Jupiter’s iconic Great Red Spot, a storm larger than Earth, has fascinated astronomers for over 150 years. But thanks to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, we’re now seeing this legendary storm in a whole new light. Recent observations show that the Great Red Spot is wobbling and fluctuating in size.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center; Lead Producer: Paul Morris The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for over three decades and continues to make ground-breaking discoveries that shape our fundamental understanding of the universe. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope and mission operations. Lockheed Martin Space, based in Denver, Colorado, also supports mission operations at Goddard. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, conducts Hubble science operations for NASA.
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Hubble’s Grand Tour of the Outer Solar System
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Science Contacts:
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NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
Michael H. Wong
University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA
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Last Updated Oct 09, 2024 Editor Andrea Gianopoulos Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
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Hubble Space Telescope
Since its 1990 launch, the Hubble Space Telescope has changed our fundamental understanding of the universe.
Studying the Outer Planets and Moons
Hubble Focus: Our Amazing Solar System
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Hubble Space Telescope Home Hubble Observes a Peculiar… Missions Hubble Home Overview About Hubble The History of Hubble Hubble Timeline Why Have a Telescope in Space? Hubble by the Numbers At the Museum FAQs Impact & Benefits Hubble’s Impact & Benefits Science Impacts Cultural Impact Technology Benefits Impact on Human Spaceflight Astro Community Impacts Science Hubble Science Science Themes Science Highlights Science Behind Discoveries Hubble’s Partners in Science Universe Uncovered Explore the Night Sky Observatory Hubble Observatory Hubble Design Mission Operations Missions to Hubble Hubble vs Webb Team Hubble Team Career Aspirations Hubble Astronauts News Hubble News Hubble News Archive Social Media Media Resources Multimedia Multimedia Images Videos Sonifications Podcasts E-books Lithographs Fact Sheets Glossary Posters Hubble on the NASA App More Online Activities 2 min read
Hubble Observes a Peculiar Galaxy Shape
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the galaxy, NGC 4694. ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Thilker This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image reveals the galaxy, NGC 4694. Most galaxies fall into one of two basic types. Spiral galaxies are young and energetic, filled with the gas needed to form new stars and sporting spiral arms that host these hot, bright youths. Elliptical galaxies have a much more pedestrian look, and their light comes from a uniform population of older and redder stars. But some galaxies require in-depth study to classify their type: such is the case with NGC 4694, a galaxy located 54 million light-years from Earth in the Virgo galaxy cluster.
NGC 4694 has a smooth-looking, armless disk which — like an elliptical galaxy — is nearly devoid of star formation. Yet its stellar population is still relatively young and new stars are actively forming in its core, powering its bright center and giving it a markedly different stellar profile from that of a classic elliptical. Although elliptical galaxies often host significant quantities of dust, they generally do not hold the fuel needed to form new stars. NGC 4694 is filled with the hydrogen gas and dust normally seen in a young and sprightly spiral, and a huge cloud of invisible hydrogen gas surrounds the galaxy.
As this Hubble image reveals, NGC 4694’s dust forms chaotic structures that indicate some kind of disturbance. It turns out that the cloud of hydrogen gas around NGC 4694 forms a long bridge to a nearby, faint dwarf galaxy named VCC 2062. The two galaxies have undergone a violent collision, and the larger NGC 4694 is accreting gas from the smaller galaxy. This collision helped give NGC 4694 its peculiar shape and star-forming activity that classify it as a lenticular galaxy. Lenticular galaxies lack the unmistakable arms of a spiral, but still have a central bulge and disk. They also hold more star-forming gas than an elliptical galaxy. Some galaxies, like NGC 4694, aren’t as easy to categorize as one type or the other. It takes a bit more digging to reveal their true nature, and thanks to Hubble, we have the ability to uncover their secrets.
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Last Updated Oct 04, 2024 Editor Andrea Gianopoulos Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
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Since its 1990 launch, the Hubble Space Telescope has changed our fundamental understanding of the universe.
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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’s brightness over time, as seen by TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite). The inset shows the system from above.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Professional and amateur astronomers teamed up with artificial intelligence to find an unmatched stellar trio called TIC 290061484, thanks to cosmic “strobe lights” captured by NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite).
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.
“Thanks to the compact, edge-on configuration of the system, we can measure the orbits, masses, sizes, and temperatures of its stars,” said Veselin Kostov, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. “And we can study how the system formed and predict how it may evolve.”
A paper, led by Kostov, describing the results was published in The Astrophysical Journal Oct. 2.
This artist’s concept illustrates how tightly the three stars in the system called TIC 290061484 orbit each other. If they were placed at the center of our solar system, all the stars’ orbits would be contained a space smaller than Mercury’s orbit around the Sun. The sizes of the triplet stars and the Sun are also to scale.NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center 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’s light.
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.
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.
“We’re mainly looking for signatures of compact multi-star systems, unusual pulsating stars in binary systems, and weird objects,” 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. “It’s exciting to identify a system like this because they’re rarely found, but they may be more common than current tallies suggest.” Many more likely speckle our galaxy, waiting to be discovered.
Partly because the stars in the newfound system orbit in nearly the same plane, scientists say it’s likely very stable despite their tight configuration (the trio’s orbits fit within a smaller area than Mercury’s orbit around the Sun). Each star’s gravity doesn’t perturb the others too much, like they could if their orbits were tilted in different directions.
But while their orbits will likely remain stable for millions of years, “no one lives here,” Rappaport said. “We think the stars formed together from the same growth process, which would have disrupted planets from forming very closely around any of the stars.” The exception could be a distant planet orbiting the three stars as if they were one.
As the inner stars age, they will expand and ultimately merge, triggering a supernova explosion in around 20 to 40 million years.
In the meantime, astronomers are hunting for triple stars with even shorter orbits. That’s hard to do with current technology, but a new tool is on the way.
This graphic highlights the search areas of three transit-spotting missions: NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, TESS (the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), and the retired Kepler Space Telescope. Kepler found 13 triply eclipsing triple star systems, TESS has found more than 100 so far, and astronomers expect Roman to find more than 1,000.NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Images from NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be much more detailed than TESS’s. 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.
“We don’t know much about a lot of the stars in the center of the galaxy except for the brightest ones,” said Brian Powell, a co-author and data scientist at Goddard. “Roman’s 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.”
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.
“We’re curious why we haven’t found star systems like these with even shorter outer orbital periods,” said Powell. “Roman should help us find them and bring us closer to figuring out what their limits might be.”
Roman could also find eclipsing stars bound together in even larger groups — half a dozen, or perhaps even more all orbiting each other like bees buzzing around a hive.
“Before scientists discovered triply eclipsing triple star systems, we didn’t expect them to be out there,” said co-author Tamás Borkovits, a senior research fellow at the Baja Observatory of The University of Szeged in Hungary. “But 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.”
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’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley; the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts; MIT’s 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.
NASA’s citizen science projects are collaborations between scientists and interested members of the public and 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, visit NASA’s Citizen Science page.
Download additional images and video from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio.
By Ashley Balzer
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Claire Andreoli
301-286-1940
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Oct 02, 2024 Related Terms
TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) Astrophysics Binary Stars Galaxies, Stars, & Black Holes Goddard Space Flight Center Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Science & Research Stars The Universe View the full article
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