NASA’s TESS Discovers Nearly 100 Quadruple Star Systems

In a pre-press release, astronomers working with NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) announced the discovery of 97 quadruple star system candidates, nearly doubling the number of known quadruple systems. The paper will be published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement.

Artist’s conception of the 30 Ari star system, a quadruple star system with an exoplanet 10 times more massive than Jupiter. Credit: Karen Teramura, UH IfA

NASA’s TESS is a survey mission designed to find exoplanets. So far, it has discovered over 5000 exoplanet candidates and 197 confirmed exoplanets since its mission began in late 2018. TESS is able to study the features of exoplanets such as mass, density, size, and orbit. TESS is also being used to identify and study multiple star systems, which is the focus of this paper.

“The candidates were identified in TESS Full Frame Image data… through a combination of machine learning techniques and visual examination, with major contributions from a dedicated group of citizen scientists.” — lead author Veselin Kostov of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, et al.

Example of one quadruple star system. Credit: NASA

This study focused efforts on identifying triple and quadruple star systems, but also found “the first sextuply-eclipsing sextuple stellar system and the first transiting circumbinary planet…