Rekordentdeckung: Drei große Sterne in einem Raum eingeschlossen, der kleiner als die Umlaufbahn von Merkur ist

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)