NCCS Enables NASA, MIT, and Citizen Scientists to
Discover Nearly 100 Eclipsing Quadruple Star Systems in
TESS Telescope Data


This artist’s concept, based on data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, depicts a quadruple star system called HD 98800. The star system is approximately 10 million years old and is 150 light-years (870 trillion miles) away from Earth in the constellation TW Hydrae. A recent study enabled by the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) has doubled the number of known quadruple star systems. Image by NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA.

NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) computing systems enabled NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and citizen scientists to discover nearly 100 eclipsing quadruple star systems from observations by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) telescope. The results were published earlier this year in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement.

“Half of the Sun-like stars in the universe are members of binary star systems, and a fraction of these are stellar triples, quadruples, or even higher-order systems,” said Veselin Kostov, a postdoctoral fellow in NASA Goddard’s Observational Cosmology Laboratory and lead author on the study. “These analogs to Earth’s Sun are important tracers of stellar formation, provide valuable information on how stars evolve and interact with each other, and also shed light on how planets form and evolve in the dynamically rich environments of multi-star systems.”

For the quadruple star analysis, Kostov collaborated with NCCS principal investigator Brian P. Powell, a data scientist in NASA Goddard’s High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC); 10 additional professional scientists at NASA Goddard, MIT, and several other universities in the U.S. and Europe; and eight amateur citizen scientists from across the U.S. and Europe, who make up the Visual Survey Group (VSG).

“The citizen scientists are an integral part of the core science team and participated in all stages of this work,” Powell said. “They discovered most of the quadruple stars included in our catalog, performed preliminary analysis of the data, and assisted with the preparation of the manuscript.” A previous collaboration with the VSG resulted in the discovery of the sextuple star system TIC 168789840 with three pairs of binary stars.

The study involved analyzing tens of terabytes of data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) telescope. Image by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab.

Driving this research was vast computational usage at NCCS. The first step was building 115 million light curves from tens of terabytes of raw TESS full-frame images, a process consuming 200 to 300 CPU-years on the NCCS Discover supercomputer. Powell credits the NCCS staff with helping the research team design their parallel implementation and optimize the light curve construction process, likely saving months of work.

Next, the scientists employed the NCCS Explore/ADAPT Science Cloud to build and train a neural network for machine learning-based identification of light curves containing eclipses, where the disks of two stars overlap one another.

Impact: The study illustrates how combining citizen science with cutting-edge software tools and resources enables the discovery of nearly 100 new eclipsing quadruple stars, effectively doubling the number of known systems.


Then, the research team combined this new, computationally generated data with archival data, visual inspection, and custom-built software tools to detect 450,000 eclipsing binary stars.

Lastly, the scientists further analyzed that large dataset to confirm 97 eclipsing quadruple stars — nearly doubling the number of known systems. Among them are intriguing star systems worthy of more detailed study, such as several candidate sextuple star systems (see figure below).

The figure shows the light curve (top) and photocenter analysis (bottom) for candidate sextuple star system TIC 1337279468 containing three binary star subsystems (PA, PB, and PC). Figure adapted from Kostov et al., 2022.

“Simply put, this work would not have been possible without the support of NCCS personnel and resources,” Powell said. He noted that the research team continues to use NCCS resources for analysis of newly released TESS data.

“We are looking to the future as well,” Powell added. “For example, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will provide optical data very similar to TESS, only much more of it. Many discoveries await.”

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Jarrett Cohen, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
August 19, 2022