Chinese Astronomers Discover Rare, Stable Three-Star System 7,000 Light-Years Away

Chinese astronomers using the FAST radio telescope have discovered an extremely rare three-star system about 7,000 light years from Earth. The system contains two dead stars and one “living” star locked in what researchers described as a steady cosmic dance.

A stable system unlike the fictional one

The discovery recalls Liu Cixin’s science fiction hit The Three-Body Problem, in which three suns throw a doomed world into chaos. The real system, however, is described as far better behaved than the fictional one.

FAST, the world’s biggest single-dish radio telescope, is located in southwestern China. Using the telescope, researchers identified a pulsar among the system’s two dead stars.

The pulsar spins more than 300 times a second, a speed compared with the blades of a kitchen blender. It circles its companion, a white dwarf, every eight days.

A white dwarf is the dim, burnt-out core of a smaller star. Together, the pulsar and the white dwarf form part of the three-star system found by the Chinese researchers. The observation matters because it shows a real three-star arrangement that remains steady, rather than producing the unstable conditions imagined in the science-fiction story.

Source: South China Morning Post