A Triple Star System Yields an Unusual Surviving Star
Our sun is a lonely star. At least half the stars in our galaxy have binary companions. This was nicely illustrated in the Star Wars movie trilogy where Luke Skywalker watched two suns set on the horizon as seen from his home planet Tatooine. Now imagine three suns in the sky! This is the story for a system that once contained three co-orbiting stars. Forensics with Hubble data show that the stars have had a tumultuous life. Two of the stars merged about 500 million years ago to make a more massive star. It eventually burned out and collapsed to an unusually massive white dwarf. The bystander to this mayhem is the once third member of the system. It siphoned material from the merged companion star to gain a new lease on life by becoming more massive and bright. But, now it is lonely, orbiting a dead star. Hubble discovered that the surviving star has an unusually fast spin rate that can only be explained if it was feeding off of the gas expelled by the stellar merger.
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