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Title    Giant Planet in Quadruple Star System
Date    Friday March 06 2015, @12:19AM
Author    janrinok
Topic   
from the how-little-we-know dept.
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15/03/05/0950236

quixote writes:

The Los Angeles Times reports on research published in The Astronomical Journal.

Astronomers have discovered a giant planet with four suns just 125 light-years from Earth. The planet is at least 10 times as big as Jupiter and scientists say it probably has no actual surface to stand on. But, if you could fly a spacecraft into its atmosphere and look up, you would see one primary sun, a bright red dot, and another star shining more brightly than Venus does in our night sky. ...

In a paper published in the Astronomical Journal, the researchers describe Ari 30 as a pair of binary systems. A large planet travels around the star known as 30 Ari B, taking about 355 days to complete its orbit. The newly discovered star is locked in a gravitational dance with 30 Ari B from a distance of less than 30 astronomical units away. (One astronomical unit is the distance between the sun and the Earth).

About 1,670 astronomical units away lie another pair of stars in a system known as 30 Ari A. The two binary systems orbit a central mass that lies in between them.

Only one other planet in a quadruple star system has been discovered before, but Roberts said that more may soon be detected.

[Editor's Note: For comparison purposes consider that Neptune orbits the Sun at an average distance of 30.1 astronomical units. See, too, this table of distances from the Sun in AU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_unit#Examples.]

Links

  1. "quixote" - http://www.molvray.com/acidtest/
  2. "Los Angeles Times" - http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-astronomers-a-world-with-four-suns-20150304-story.html
  3. "The Astronomical Journal" - http://iopscience.iop.org/1538-3881/149/4/118/article?fromSearchPage=true
  4. "Neptune orbits the Sun at an average distance of 30.1 astronomical units." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptune_(astronomy)

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printed from SoylentNews, Giant Planet in Quadruple Star System on 2024-03-29 12:57:45