Submitted by jelias on Sun, 2021-01-24 21:35
A rare stellar system has been discovered by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and studied by an international team using several telescopes, including the SOAR Telescope and the CTIO 1.5-m. The lead authors, Brian Powell and Veselin Kostov from the Goddard Space Flight Center, discovered that the 11th magnitude star TIC 168789840 observed by TESS contains three close binaries, all of them eclipsing (periods 1.5, 1.3, and 8 days). New and archival ground-based data helped the international team of researchers to establish the structure and physics of this unique system.
