An
international team of astronomers have announced the discovery of a
planet whose skies are illuminated by four suns – the first known of its
type.
The
planet, located about 5,000 light years from Earth, has been dubbed PH1
in honor of Planet Hunters, a programme led by Yale University in the
United States which enlists volunteers to look for signs of new planets.
PH1
is orbiting two suns, and in turn is orbited by a second distant pair
of stars. Only six planets are known to orbit two stars, researchers
say, and none of those are orbited by other distant stars.
“Circumbinary
planets are the extremes of planet formation,” said Yale’s Meg Schwamb,
lead author of a paper presented Monday at the annual meeting of the
Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society in
Nevada.
“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.”
US citizen
scientists and Planet Hunters participants Kian Jek and Robert Gagliano
were the first to identify PH1. Their observations were then confirmed
by a team of US and British researchers working in Hawaii.
PH1
is a gas giant with a radius about 6.2 times that of Earth, making it a
bit bigger than Neptune. It orbits a pair of eclipsing stars that are
1.5 and 0.41 times the mass of the Sun roughly every 138 days. The
two other stars are orbiting the planetary system at a distance that is
roughly 1,000 times the distance between Earth and the Sun.
The
Planethunters.org website was created in 2010 to encourage amateur
astronomers to identify planets outside our solar system, using data
from the US space agency NASA’s Kepler space telescope.
Kepler, launched in March 2009, is NASA’s first mission in search of Earth-like planets orbiting stars similar to our Sun.
The
discovery of PH1 was made available online Monday at the site arxiv.org
and has been submitted to the Astrophysical Journal for publication.
“It
still continues to astonish me how we can detect, let alone glean so
much information, about another planet thousands of light-years away
just by studying the light from its parent star,” Jek said.
Source: Aljazeera
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