Scientists Observe Star Triplets Being Born

It's not every day that you can witness the miracle of having triplets be born - and especially not triplets that are millions of miles away in the form of star systems.

Phys.org reported that for the first time, they were able to see a dusty disk of material around a young star that is the beginning of the formation of a multiple-star system. Scientists suspected that the process was casused by a gravitational instability, but new observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) showed the process in action.

John Tobin, from the University of Oklahoma and Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands shared that this new work supports the conclusion of having two mechanisms that can form multiple star systems - fragmentations of circumstellar disks like the one just observed, or the fragmentation of the larger clouds of gas and dust, many of which young stars are from.

The forming system is called L1448 IRS3B and it's relatively near - just 750 light-years away from Earth, in the constellation Perseus. The system's three protostars may share an origin, but they are not exactly identical. Space.com said that the bright star at the center has a companion separated by 62 times the distance from the Earth to the sun, and the third protostar circles out in the dust cloud, 183 times the Earth-Sun distance.

Kaitlin Kratter, a researcher from the University of Arizona and co-author of the study said that the system seems to be young - around 150,000 years old. She also said that "analysis indicates that the disk is unstable, and the most widely separated of the three protostars may have formed only in the past 10,000 to 20,000 years."

Protostars are cooler and lower in mass than mature stars, thus, they appear very close together. However, it was only due to recent technology that radio telescopes had been sensitive enough to see these multistar systems in their early days.