Neighbors

The star systems centered on newly born developing stars, known as 253-1536, are located 50 billion km apart and bound together by a common center of gravity. It would take 100 years for the inhabitants of the planets to be formed to move from one system to another with today's technology

This is how the pair of star disks looks like in a picture taken by the Hubble Space Telescope

The two bubbles shown here, in the picture taken by the Hubble telescope, are not of a pair of amoebae lying side by side in a petri dish. These are two star systems next to each other in the process of formation. The star systems centered on newly born developing stars, known as 253-1536, are located 1300 light-years away and bound together by a common center of gravity. One of the disks was discovered in Hubble's image, but the other disk was hidden by the glow of its star. Hubble only saw a shadow of the disc, so the amount of material and its ability to become planets was unknown until a University of Hawaii team observed the object at the Submillimeter Array (SMA) observatory at Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

"The SMA array was able to photograph this binary system at almost the same level of detail as the Hubble Space Telescope, but in the far infrared region, where you can see the glow of the dust, not its shadow," explains doctoral student Rita Mann, who and her partner Dr. Jonathan Williams used SMA.

As mentioned, the two stars are relatively very close, 50 billion kilometers apart, that is, 400 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun (400 astronomical units). It will take them about 4,500 years - about the time of written human history - to surround the common center.

This is how the pair of star disks looks like in the sub-millimeter array

The mass of each of the two stars is about a third of that of the sun, which means that these suns will be colder and redder. From the perspective of potential inhabitants of the planets orbiting each of these stars, it will appear to them as a fixed bright point in the sky, a thousand times brighter than the brightest star in our night sky - Sirius. The planets of the second system will be observable with telescopes, which means that potential inhabitants of one system will be able in the future to visit the inhabitants of the neighboring system. Such a journey would take about 100 years with current human technology.