[NTDTV, Beijing time, February 27, 2022]Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is a space telescope launched by NASA, which is mainly used to find and observe exoplanets. But recently, scientists have discovered 97 celestial systems composed of 4 stars from its massive observational data.
As the name suggests,TESSTelescopes look for exoplanets through changes in starlight caused by planets passing in front of them. Since its launch, it has scanned nearly 85% of the sky, providing scientists with a wealth of astronomical data.
These data are complex and disordered, and scientists must analyze them through various methods to be able to interpret all kinds of information people want to know, including the mass, density, volume and orbit of exoplanets. Now, by using machine learning algorithms, an international team of researchers has discovered information about four-body stars.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space collaborated on the analysis with the help of seven scientists.
“In order to rule out false positives caused by nearby stars or other overall factors, we have to analyze the light curvature of the observed target pixel by pixel,” the researchers wrote in their analysis report.
Why is it so difficult?A report from Universe Today explained that because the so-calledfour star systemis composed of two orbiting, close enoughbinary star systemcomposition. However, even if the observational data shows that the two binary star systems are orbiting each other, if the two binary star systems are far apart, the interaction effect between them may not be reflected in hundreds of years. This is not the four-star system that scientists now plan to probe.
In the images shown by TESS observations, one pixel represents an extremely wide range of space in the universe.For example, two distances from the earth are 500 parsecs (parsecs, cosmic scale units, 1 parsec is about 3.26 light-years)binary star system, the distance between them is two pixels, indicating that they are separated by about 20,000 astronomical units (AU, also the unit of distance described in astronomy, one astronomical unit is equivalent to the distance between the earth and the sun). Two systems so far apart, in the time scale of Earthlings, the effect of their interaction can only be reflected in the time span of several generations. So the researchers needed to filter these systems out of the results, what they refer to as “pixel-by-pixel analysis.”
So, this study left 97four star systemboth consist of two binary star systems that are close enough to each other that the impact between them will manifest itself in a matter of months or years.
These four-star systems have important implications for understanding the birth and evolution of stars, the study said. For example, the characteristics of the mass grouping in the stars, the ratio of the orbiting period, the orbital inclination, etc., can tell whether these stars were born from a large dust disk split into small clumps, or whether the dust gathered into clusters under the action of gravity and was born.
Of course, if there are planets in these four-star systems, they are also objects of great interest to scientists. Several planets in four-star systems have been discovered before. Scientists know very little about its birth process and future evolutionary fate.
For example, in 2019, a peculiar four-star system, HD 98800, was discovered, with the star plane at right angles to the protoplanetary disk. Imagine what a few suns in the sky would look like from a planet born in this protoplanetary disk?
(Transfer from The Epoch Times/Editor-in-charge: Ye Ping)
URL of this article: https://www.ntdtv.com/b5/2022/02/27/a103359266.html