Friday, 8 July 2016

Newly discovered planet has 3 suns


Newly discovered planet has 3 suns
If you thought Luke Skywalker's home planet, Tatooine, was a strange world with its two suns in the sky, imagine this: a planet where you'd either experience constant daylight or enjoy triple sunrises and sunsets each day, depending on the seasons, which happen to last longer than human lifetimes.

Such a world has been discovered by a team of astronomers led by the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona, using direct imaging. The planet, HD 131399Ab, is unlike any other known world - on by far the widest known orbit within a multi-star system.

Located about 340 light years from Earth in the constellation Centaurus, HD 131399Ab is believed to be about 16 million years old, making it one of the youngest exoplanets discovered to date, and one of very few directly imaged planets. With a temperature of 850 Kelvin (about 1,070 degrees Fahrenheit or 580 degrees Celsius) and weighing in at an estimated four Jupiter masses, it is also one of the coldest and least massive directly imaged exoplanets.

Article: http://phys.org/news/2016-07-newly-planet-suns.html#jCp

Paper:
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2016/07/06/science.aaf9671

#space   #science   #research   #Jovianexoplanet

2 comments:

  1. It is not unusual that a star is orbiting another star. In fact it is quite common. But this really beats the wildest imagination. A star orbiting another star which, in turn, orbits another, biger one. And a planet in between. Wow. That's really something to think about...

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