A weird four-star system may lead the way to catastrophic supernovae

About 460 light-years from Earth lies the small but lovely star cluster IC 2391. It only has about 250 stars in it, but one of them is special… because it’s actually four stars, a quaternary system. Astronomers studying this system have now shown that complicated interactions between the stars will lead to quite the life for them, and maybe — maybe — quite the death.