NASA's Spitzer has discovered a young stellar system consisting of three developing stars. The newly discovered system reportedly "blinks" every 93 days.
NASA's Spitzer spacecraft has discovered a new, young stellar system now named YLW 16A, which blinks every 93 days. The system consists of three developing stars, two of which have a disk of material left over from the star-formation process surrounding them. These disks resemble a "hula hoop." The hoop looked to be misaligned from the other pair and scientists assume that this could be because of the gravitational presence of the third star orbiting at the periphery of the system.
YLW 16A is the fourth example of a star system known to blink in such a manner. This new finding suggests that the existence of such star systems may be more common than previously believed.
"These blinking systems offer natural probes of the binary and circumbinary planet formation process," Peter Plavchan, a scientist at the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute and Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif., said in a press release.
The system was located in the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, which is 407 light years away from Earth. The complex is a star-forming region comprising mainly of dust and dense gas.
The dust disk surrounding the stars will eventually be the fuel for the formation of other stars and planets to build a new solar system, NASA officials said. Future observations of blinking stellar systems could provide new insight on planet formations as well as the dust and other material that make up the disks.
