Extremely Rare Planet With Three Suns Discovered By Scientists

Star system resting on the constellation Orion¡¯s nose could be home to the rarest planet in our universe -- a world orbiting three suns simultaneously.

ESO/L. Cal?ada, Exeter/Kraus et al.

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While sci-fi movies like Star Wars have often helped imagine what a world with two suns would look like, scientists might have come across a planet which orbits around three suns, in the star system known as GW Orionis, located 1,300 light-years away from Earth.

Reported first by LiveScience, the star system has already been an intriguing subject for researchers to study -- three dusty orange rocks inside one another, reminiscent of a bull¡¯s eye. However, at its centre live three stars, two of which are locked in a tight binary orbit with one another while a third moves widely around the other two.

While this whole arrangement is rare in its own way, GW Ori got weirder when astronomers glanced at it using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array telescope in Chile when they found that the three rings are actually misaligned with one another, with the innermost ring moving rapidly in its orbit.

The team, in a study published in 2020, revealed that this could be due to the presence of a young planet, or the formation of one, that could be causing a gravitational imbalance. And now, a paper recently published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society shows fresh evidence of that planet's presence.

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The authors of the study conducted 3D simulations to understand the formation of gaps in the star system's rings, based on observations of other dust rings elsewhere in the universe. The team tested two possibilities -- either the break in rings are formed from the torque applied by three twirling stars at the star system¡¯s centre or it could be a result of a break after a planet was formed within the rings.

ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), S. Kraus & J. Bi; NRAO/AUI/NSF, S. Dagnello)

Eventually, researchers concluded that there isn¡¯t enough turbulence in the rings for the first possibility, thus indicating that the occurrence could be due to an enormous Jupiter-sized planet or planets.

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If observations in the future support this theory, this could be the first evidence of a circumtriple planet carving a gap in real-time, according to lead study author Jeremy Smallwood, from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in a conversation with The New York Times.

Although in case you might be wondering how the day and nights would look on the planet with the three stars, it actually wouldn¡¯t appear as fascinating. The two stars at the centre of the system are in such a short orbit that they would actually appear as one large star, with the third one moving around them.

What do you think of this rare new solar system discovery? Let us know in the comments below and keep reading Indiatimes.com for the latest science and technology news.