Discovery of a planet with three suns – Europe1

This is a rare find. A team of astronomers has discovered an exoplanet with three suns. Another feature, on this strange planet, a tough year … more than 500 years! An even stranger world than the Tatooine planet of Luke Skywalker, hero of the saga “Star Wars” orbiting two suns, say the scientists whose discovery was published Thursday in the journal Science .

Plus one life to see the twilight . If binary star systems are relatively common, those with three stars and more are rare. “Imagine a world in which one could admire three dawns and three dusks daily depending on the season”, which in this case lasts longer than a human life since the orbit of the planet around the three stars is the equivalent of 550 terrestrial years, the scientists write.

“for about half of the orbit, the three suns were visible in the sky, the two fainter remaining closer to one another, while their apparent separation of the main star – the brightest – varies during the year, “said Kevin Wagner, an astronomer at the University of Arizona, a lead author of the discovery. This is what shows this virtual reconstruction.

  
  Three three sunrises and sunsets.   This proximity between the three stars is  reflected, as on Earth, by an alternation of night  and day, but with three daily sunrises and three  sunsets, says the scientist. But when the orbit of  the planet is growing and the three suns move  further apart, the world knows the day almost  continuously for about a quarter of its orbit of  140 Earth years. 
  
  One of the youngest exoplanet . This  planet named HD has 131399Ab orbit farthest ever  recorded in a multi-star system. Located about 340  light years from Earth (one light year is  equivalent to 9.460 billion km), in the  constellation Centaurus, this planet would have  formed there are only 16 million years, making it  one younger exoplanets discovered to date. 
  
 in a mass equivalent to four times that of  Jupiter, HD 131399Ab is inhospitable with a  temperature of 580 degrees Celsius which is  paradoxically one of the coldest for this type of  giant exoplanet. 
  
 "this exoplanet is one of the few to have been  directly observed and also the first with such an  orbit," said Daniel Apai, assistant professor of  astronomy and science planetary Arizona State  University and member of the research team. "If  the planet was a little further from the main  star, she would be ejected from the star system,"  he explains. "Our mathematical simulations show  that this type of orbit may be stable, but only  one small change can quickly become unstable,"  said the professor. 
  
  A good observation object for astronomers  .  the planets in multi-star systems are of  great interest to astronomers because they provide  examples of planetary formations in extreme  scenarios, he says. According to this scientist,  "these planets could potentially be as numerous as  those systems with a single star (...) but they  are less explored." 
 
  
  
  Sphere, super tracker exoplanet  
  
 the discovery of the exoplanet is the first  one with Sphere (Spectro-Polarimetric  High-contrast exoplanet Research Instrument) , one  of the most advanced instruments in the world to  hunt for exoplanets. Sensitive to infrared light,  it can detect the thermal signature of young  planets. 
  
 NASA announced in May discovered 1,284  exoplanet with the Kepler space telescope,  doubling the number of those already confirmed and  increasing hopes of finding a sister planet Earth  where life would be possible.