Astronomers at the Open University have discovered the first quintuple star system containing two eclipsing binary stars. While scientists think that about a third of stars are found in pairs or multiple systems, to find five stars connected to each other is very rare.
The unusual star system was originally detected in archived data from the SuperWASP (Wide Angle Search for Planets) project, which uses relatively small and low-cost cameras in the Canary Islands and South Africa to image almost the whole sky every few minutes. Over many years, its measurements of the brightness of individual stars have been assembled into light curves - plots of brightness against time - for some 30 million sources in the Milky Way.
