Quintuple Star System

[radtech497]

This popped up while I was constructing my mammoth reply...

What figure are you using for luminosities? http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.07065 gives temperatures, masses, and radii, which should allow calculating that, but I don't know how to derive them for the contact binary, since it only gives a common temperature for the two.

Do you have any additional information on orbit parameters or the like?

I used some figures from this paper instead; note in Table 8 there is some uncertainty about the smaller component of the contact binary pair's temperature: depending on whether or not a starspot was observed, the temperature might be as low as 4730K or as high as 4790K. Feeling a bit parsimonious, I split the difference and called it 4760K.

The same paper estimates the distance to the system to be 70 parsecs. The two components, according to the Simbad database, are separated by 1.86 seconds of arc, which at that distance works out to be 130.201 AU (19,477,722,574.314 km); this is an order of magnitude greater than the news reports, so take that with a moon-sized grain of salt.

Radtech497