The Hubble Space Telescope is humanity's eyes in the heavens as it continues to explore the universe with the help of its powerful telescopes, capable of scanning the cosmos light years away.
Based on the statement released by NASA, the two suns or stars are separated from each other in a 7 million mile distance. The newly discovered planet then revolves around them in an approximately 300 million mile distance. This is located inside the star system OGLE-2007-BLG-349 and is 8,000 light years away from the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.
NASA says that a full orbit or revolution by the planet around the two stars takes roughly seven earth years to complete. Hints that a double star system exists was first laid out in 2007, but now, harder and more factual evidence is uncovered thanks to the ground-based analysis of Hubble's observations.
The Mystery of the Twin Star System
Mystery also lurks in the newly discovered star system as a third body, most probably another planet is seen to be near or inside the system.
David Bennett of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland says, "The ground-based observations suggested two possible scenarios for the three-body system: a Saturn-mass planet orbiting a close binary star pair or a Saturn-mass and an Earth-mass planet orbiting a single star."
After the Hubble Space Telescope initially observed the findings, the team of scientists led by Bennett did a follow up observation through the Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 in hopes of getting to know more about the mystery that lurks in the twin star system.
Bennett adds, "We were helped in the analysis by the almost perfect alignment of the foreground binary stars with the background star, which greatly magnified the light and allowed us to see the signal of the two stars."
With this new discovery, we can get to learn more about the universe, as well as how life originated in our planet. If things go as planned, this will surely inspire future space missions.
