With the help of NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, scientists were able to find a double eclipse of a four-star system. The system was noted as EPIC 219217635. Its stars resemble the Sun in size with a massiveness from 0.41 to 1.3 solar.
In 2013, a telescope-exoplanet hunter Kepler lost two reactionary wheels. The mission was restarted under the name K2. The main goal is to conduct high-precision photometry of selected fields in the ecliptic. Up to this point, the mission has identified more than 300 alien worlds and many star systems.
EPIC 219217635 was initially identified as a potential fourfold star system as early as Campaign 7 (late 2015). Then they found out that the system distant by 2800 light years is represented by two darkened binary systems with orbital periods of 3.6 and 0.62 days. Duplicate files are removed in orbit at 20 a. e. from each other.
The scattered and minimized light curves of the 3.595-day “A” and the 0.618-day “B” binary systems (red dots). Black lines are light curves extracted from the simultaneous solution of the light curvature. With a binary code, the gray points are the sum of the light curvature and a simple model of the rotational spot. The bottom panel displays the remains of complete K2 data. EPIC 219217635 A is represented by a star, which is 20% larger and more massive than the Sun, and a satellite with a radius of 0.74 and a mass of 0.68 solar. The larger object is 2.24 brighter than the Sun, and the temperature is 6473 K. The parameters of the smaller one are 0.19 of the solar luminosity and 4421 K of surface heating.
The main star in the EPIC 219217635 V system is 30% larger and more massive than the Sun at a temperature of 6931 K and a brightness of 3.66 solar. The second star resembles ours (radius - 1.04 solar and mass - 0.41), warms up to 4163 K, and brightness reaches 0.29 solar.
It was also revealed that the EPIC 219217635 V system is developing, as the smaller star gave some of its mass to a larger neighbor. The system is bright, so eclipses can be seen in small ground-based telescopes.
