Overview
- The system, TIC 120362137, lies about 1,900 light-years away and consists of a 3.28‑day inner binary, a third star on a 51.3‑day orbit, and a fourth star circling the trio in roughly 1,045 days.
- Three inner stars fit within a region comparable to Mercury’s orbit, and the outer companion orbits closer than Jupiter’s distance from the Sun, establishing a record for compactness in 3+1 systems.
- TESS eclipse signatures revealed the architecture, and follow-up ground-based spectroscopy directly detected all four stellar components.
- The inner trio is hotter and more massive than the Sun and moves in an almost flat, common plane, while the outer, Sun-like star is inclined by at most about ten degrees.
- Evolutionary modeling predicts sequential mergers in the inner system, ultimately yielding a long-lived binary of two white dwarfs on timescales from hundreds of millions to billions of years.