July 21, 2022

Artistic concept of gravitationally bound binary systems (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA)

An article published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters” offers a number of clues about the triple system TIC 470710327 being the result of a stellar merger. A team of researchers used the HERMES spectrograph mounted on the Mercator Telescope for follow-up observations of this system, which was discovered thanks to NASA’s TESS space telescope, a discovery that was announced in an article published in April 2022 in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society”. Computer simulations led the researchers to conclude that originally there were two gravitationally-bound binary systems and in one of them, the two stars merged into one that ended up forming a triple system with the other two.