Take that, Tatooine: First planet with four suns found

Jacob Aron, reporter

(Image: Haven Giguere/Yale)

Love to watch the sun set? You would be spoiled for choice on new-found planet PH1, the first world discovered in a four-star system. The unique planet circles a pair of stars that orbit each other, known as a binary, which are in turn orbited by another distant stellar pair. That gives PH1 two more suns than Tatooine, the fictional world that appears in the Star Wars saga.

Signs of PH1 were first spotted by volunteers via planethunters.org, which lets citizen scientists review data from NASA's Kepler telescope. Astronomers then followed up with observations from the Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, which confirmed the planet's existence.

PH1 is thought to be a gas giant with a radius around six times that of Earth, making it larger than Neptune. The planet orbits a pair of stars, one slightly larger than the sun and one smaller, roughly every 138 days. Further out, at a distance of around 100 billion kilometres, about 1000 times the gap between Earth and the sun, a second pair of stars orbits the first.

Such quadruple star systems are not unusual, but this is the first time astronomers have found one containing a planet. "The discovery of these systems is forcing us to go back to the drawing board to understand how such planets can assemble and evolve in these dynamically challenging environments," says Meg Schwamb at Yale University. She led the research, which was presented yesterday at the annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society in Reno, Nevada.

Those in search of other dramatic sunsets could also try Kepler 16b, one of just six planets known to orbit two stars, or HD 188753, which closely circles a single star that is also orbited by a nearby binary.

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/24896430/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cshortsharpscience0C20A120C10A0Cfirst0Eplanet0Espotted0Ein0Efour0Es0Bhtml0Dcmpid0FRSS0QNSNS0Q20A120EGLOBAL0Qonline0Enews/story01.htm

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