Pic of the Week: A Triple-Star System

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Hubble image of a triple-star system. (NASA, ESA, G. Duchene (Universite de Grenoble I); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America))

This week’s image is from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. It shows a triple-star system that consists of the variable star HP Tau, HP Tau G2, and HP Tau G3.

NASA explains:

HP Tau is known as a T Tauri star, a type of young variable star that hasn’t begun nuclear fusion yet but is beginning to evolve into a hydrogen-fueled star similar to our Sun. T Tauri stars tend to be younger than 10 million years old ― in comparison, our Sun is around 4.6 billion years old ― and are often found still swaddled in the clouds of dust and gas from which they formed.