We live in a solar system where there is only one star -the Sun. But a team of volunteers, along with two amateur astronomers, has discovered such a planet which has four Suns. The planet is called PH1 (full form Planet Hunter 1). Want to know some more mysterious information about this planet? Read more below.
PH1 is being called a circumbinary planet which is almost 5,000 light years away from the Earth. PH1 orbits one pair of stars and during the planet’s revolution, another pair of stars revolves the planet. It means, four stars light up its skies. You can also say the planet has four Sun.
PH1 orbits outside the 20-day orbit of a pair of eclipsing stars. The eclipsing stars are 1.5 and 0.41 times the mass of our Sun. PH1 circles these eclipsing stars about every 138 days. The other two stars that orbit the planetary system are about 1,000 times the distance between Earth and the Sun.
Kian Jek of San Francisco and Robert Gagliano of Arizona first spotted faint dips in light while PH1 had been passing its parent stars. According to researchers, there are six planets in the space that orbit two stars but none of these are orbited by distant stellar companions. But PH1 is the very first planet that has four stars in its planetary system. They found this planet using the planethunters.org website. Researchers believe that the planet is a bit bigger than Neptune and six times than the Earth.
Meg Schwamb of Yale said, “Circumbinary planets are the extremes of planet formation. 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.”
Jek said, “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.”
Source : TGDaily
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