“Against All Odds” –NASA’s Planet-Hunting Tess Discovers a Unique Star System with Six ‘Suns’ (Weekend Feature - The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel

The breadth of observation of TESS, encompasses nearly the entire sky, allowing for the identification of many candidate multiple star systems through the analysis of eclipses in the lightcurves.

A collaboration between the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the MIT Kavli Institute, in conjunction with expert visual surveyors, has found well over 100 triple and quadruple star system candidates.

The large majority of the TESS discovered candidate triple and quadruple star systems are quadruples, followed by triples since it began searching the galaxy for exoplanets in 2018.

“Though quadruple systems are much more rare than triple systems,” reports NASA, “the large outer orbit of the third star in a hierarchical triple, necessary for stability, substantially reduces the probability that the eclipse or occultation of the third star will be visually noticed in a TESS lightcurve.

Beyond quadruple stars, the probability of systems with more stars being identified via photometry alone is remote, as the formation of sextuple systems is likely quite rare.

Although several of other six-star systems have been discovered, reports Andrews about NASA’s TESS discovery, this is the first in which the stars within each of those three pairings pass in front of and behind each other, eclipsing the other member of its stellar ballet, at least from the TESS space telescope’s view.

“These are the types of signals that algorithms really struggle with,” said lead author Veselin Kostov, a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at Goddard Space Flight Center working.

The Daily Galaxy, Jake Burba, via Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA Arxiv.org PDF, and New York Times Science