A new planet that has four different suns illuminating its sky has been discovered. The planet is the first of its kind ever to be discovered.
A report submitted to the Astrophysical Journal suggests that astronomers found a new planet that orbits a pair of stars, which have a second stellar pair revolving around them.
The discovery was made by volunteers using the Planethunters.org website. The new planet is said to be 5,000 light years away from Earth and has been named PH1.
"You don't have to go back too far before you would have got really good odds against one of these systems existing," Dr. Chris Lintott, from the University of Oxford, told BBC News. "All four stars pulling on it creates a very complicated environment. Yet there it sits in an apparently stable orbit. That's really confusing, which is one of the things which makes this discovery so fun. It's absolutely not what we would have expected."
Planets orbiting two stars are not rare but only a few planets, better known as exoplanets are known to orbit such binaries
Asked how this planet remained in a stable orbit whilst being pulled on by the gravity of four stars, Dr Lintott said, "There are six other well-established planets around double stars, and they're all pretty close to those stars.
"So I think what this is telling us are planets can form in the inner parts of protoplanetary discs (the torus of dense gas that gives rise to planetary systems). The planets are forming close in and are able to cling to a stable orbit there. That probably has implications for how planets form elsewhere."
PH1 was discovered by two U.S. volunteers using the Planethunters.org website: Kian Jek of San Francisco and Robert Gagliano from Cottonwood, Arizona.
"Computerized attempts to find things [in the data] missed this system entirely," Dr. Lintott points out. "That tells you there are probably more of these that are slipping through our fingers. We've just stuck a load of new data up on Planethunters.org to help people find the next one."
Searching for such systems, he said, was "a complicated test to hand a computer. We're using human pattern recognition, which can disentangle that reasonably well to see the important stuff."
