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Three-Starred System Has Giant Planet

posted by takyon on Thursday April 07 2016, @10:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the hot-mess dept.

butthurt writes:

Reported in The Astronomical Journal (DOI: 10.3847/0004-6256/151/2/45), KELT-4Ab orbits one of the stars in a triple stellar system. Considered a "hot Jupiter" because of its large size and small orbit, it is only the fourth planet that has been found in association with a triple star system. KELT-4A is the brightest star in the system. KELT-4B and KELT-4C, separated from each other by about 10 astronomical units (AU), form a binary, about 328 AU distant from KELT-4A. The system is about 685 light-years from us.

The planet was detected in a survey by the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope. Scientific American has a story about the discovery.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 07 2016, @10:52PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 07 2016, @10:52PM (#328721)

    The general three body problem is in fact solvable. It isn't solvable analytically but a sequence which converges on the exact answer has been known since the 1930's. Convergence is too slow to be useful but the book seriously overstated how unsolvable it is.

    If you need 10^8000000 terms to solve it, then yes, it is quite unsolvable.

    However [sciencemag.org], . . .

  • (Score: 2) by AnonymousCowardNoMore on Friday April 08 2016, @03:47AM

    by AnonymousCowardNoMore (5416) on Friday April 08 2016, @03:47AM (#328815)

    You are entirely correct. What I mean to say is that the book implies the problem to be unsolvable in principle, especially given that the magic technobabble that the Trisolarans possess in the book should make such a calculation trivial. (It's in one of the ROT13 spoilers.) The special cases don't come into play since they don't apply to this situation but are, of course, beautiful.