Chinese astronomers find real 3-body system. It is not what Liu Cixin thinks
Por Ling Xin — South China Morning Post – News feed
Advertisement Science China Science Chinese astronomers find real 3-body system. It is not what Liu Cixin thinks
In a case of life imitating art, Chinese researchers have discovered an ‘extremely rare’ three-star system that is not science fiction
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Ling Xin in Ohio Published: 9:00am, 23 Oct 2026 Updated: 9:05am, 23 Oct 2026 In author and computer engineer Liu Cixin ’s science fiction hit The Three-Body Problem, three suns throw a doomed world into chaos. Chinese astronomers say they have found a real three-star system that is far better behaved. Using FAST, the world’s biggest single-dish radio telescope in southwestern China, the researchers found two dead stars and a “living” one locked in a steady cosmic dance about 7,000 light years from Earth.
One of the dead stars is a pulsar that spins more than 300 times a second, about as fast as the blades of a kitchen blender. It whirls around its partner, a white dwarf – the dim, burnt-out core of a smaller star – every eight days.
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