A Triple Star System Yields an Unusual Surviving Star

Unlike our Sun, which exists alone, at least half of the stars in our galaxy have a companion. This concept was famously depicted in the Star Wars movies, where Luke Skywalker watched two suns set over his home planet, Tatooine. But imagine a world with three suns in the sky—this was once the reality for a remarkable triple-star system recently studied by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

Hubble’s data reveals that this system had a chaotic past. Around 500 million years ago, two of the stars merged, forming a much larger and more massive star. Over time, this new star burned through its fuel and eventually collapsed into an unusually massive white dwarf. The third star in the system, once a companion, became a bystander to this cosmic upheaval.