Summary of the article by ScienceAlert journalist Michelle Starr:
A trio of stars just under 5,000 light-years away has absolutely smashed a long standing record.
TIC 290061484 is a system of gravitationally bound stars consisting of a tightly-orbiting binary pair with a third star that circles both. Astonishingly, they’re so close together the entire system would fit inside the orbit of [Mercury](https://sciencealert.com/mercury).
And that’s not all. The tight trio seems to have another friend; there are hints of a fourth star describing a path at a much greater distance.
All three of the stars in the central trinary are on a collision course, destined to collide, merge, go supernova, and leave behind a single [neutron star](https://sciencealert.com/neutron-stars), in around 20 million years.
Three star systems and scientists discovering mystery particles in the accelerators? Uuuh anyone been checking communications in a certain satellite lab in China? How are all of our physicists doing?
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Summary of the article by ScienceAlert journalist Michelle Starr:
A trio of stars just under 5,000 light-years away has absolutely smashed a long standing record.
TIC 290061484 is a system of gravitationally bound stars consisting of a tightly-orbiting binary pair with a third star that circles both. Astonishingly, they’re so close together the entire system would fit inside the orbit of [Mercury](https://sciencealert.com/mercury).
And that’s not all. The tight trio seems to have another friend; there are hints of a fourth star describing a path at a much greater distance.
All three of the stars in the central trinary are on a collision course, destined to collide, merge, go supernova, and leave behind a single [neutron star](https://sciencealert.com/neutron-stars), in around 20 million years.
The discovery was made using the [TESS exoplanet-hunting space telescope](https://www.sciencealert.com/nasa-s-new-planet-hunting-telescope-just-found-its-first-earth-sized-alien-world), which is optimized for detecting the minute changes in the brightness of a star that indicate an orbiting world.
Read the peer-reviewed paper here: [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ad7368](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ad7368)
Three star systems and scientists discovering mystery particles in the accelerators? Uuuh anyone been checking communications in a certain satellite lab in China? How are all of our physicists doing?