In author and computer engineer Liu Cixin’s science fiction hit The Three-Body Problem, three suns throw a doomed world into chaos. Chinese astronomers say they have found a real three-star system that is far better behaved.
Using FAST, the world’s biggest single-dish radio telescope in southwestern China, the researchers found two dead stars and a “living” one locked in a steady cosmic dance about 7,000 light years from Earth.
One of the dead stars is a pulsar that spins more than 300 times a second, about as fast as the blades of a kitchen blender. It whirls around its partner, a white dwarf – the dim, burnt-out core of a smaller star – every eight days.