A newly discovered planet has three suns

[Avinash]

From MSNBC

 

A newly discovered planet has bountiful sunshine, with not one, not two, but three suns glowing in its sky.

 

It is the first extrasolar planet found in a system with three stars. How a planet was born amidst these competing gravitational forces will be a challenge for planet formation theories.

 

"The environment in which this planet exists is quite spectacular," said Maciej Konacki from the California Institute of Technology. "With three suns, the sky view must be out of this world -- literally and figuratively."

 

The triple-star system, HD 188753, is located 149 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. The primary star is like our Sun, weighing 1.06 solar masses. The other two stars form a tightly bound pair, which is separated from the primary by approximately the Sun-Saturn distance.

 

"The pair more or less acts as one star," Konacki told SPACE.com.

 

The combined mass of the close pair is 1.63 solar masses.

 

Using the 10-meter Keck I telescope in Hawaii, Konacki noticed evidence for a planet orbiting the primary star. This newfound gas giant is slightly larger than Jupiter and whirls around its central star in a 3.5-day orbit. A planet so close to its star would be very hot.

 

Although other so-called hot Jupiters have been found in such close-in orbits, the nearby stellar pair in HD 188753 likely sheared off much of the planet making material in the disk that would likely have existed around the primary star in its youth. Since this proto-planetary disk holds the construction materials for planets, there does not appear to be any safe place for this far-off world to have been assembled.

 

Snow line and migration

The heat coming from a nearby star frustrates the initial stages of giant planet formation -- the gluing together of planetary seeds, called cores. Therefore, the typical hot Jupiter is thought to form farther out -- beyond a theoretical limit called the snow line.

 

"Past about 3 AU, it is cold enough to form ices and other solid material for building cores," Konacki said. An AU is the distance between the Sun and the Earth -- about 93 million miles.

 

Once a sufficiently large core is built outside the snow line, the planet can start accreting gas and -- if the conditions are right -- migrate toward its sun.

 

Although this scenario appears to work in most stellar systems, it has difficulty explaining the newly-discovered planet in HD 188753. Of all the planet-harboring stars known, this is the closest that a stellar companion has ever been found.

 

"The problem is that the pair is a massive perturber to the system," Konacki said. "Together, these two stars are more massive than the main star."