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JULY 20-JULY 26,2005
NEWS
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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
11
T o t h c e d y u t r u s v w u y
SCIENCE
First planet with three suns discovered
An artist's conception of how the sky would look to an observer on a just-discovered giant planet in an unusual triple-star system in the constellation Cygnus (the Swan). The big star is only 4 million miles from the planet. The other two are almost 900 million miles away.
BY ROBERT S. BOYD
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
Photo illustration by California Institute of Technology, Pasadena/KRT
WASHINGTON — "Star Wars" fans know all about Tatooine, Luke Skywalker's home planet, whose two suns glare down on a vast desert.
Now comes an even more extraordinary, real-life sight: a newly discovered giant planet with three suns wheeling overhead.
The Jupiter-sized world is 149 light-years (about 879 trillion miles, just next door for astronomers) away from Earth in a triple-star system in the northern constellation Cygnus, or the Swan.
Maciej Konacki, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, reported the sighting in this week's edition of the British scientific journal Nature.
"With three suns, the sky view must be out of this world, literally and figuratively," Konacki said.
About 150 extrasolar planets have been discovered in the past
10 years. This is the first time a planet has been found in a cluster of three star systems.
The main star of the trio, named HD 188753, is slightly larger than our sun. But it would look enormous to an observer on the planet, which whirls around its host star every three and a half days at a distance of about 4 million miles. Our sun, 93 million miles away, looks much smaller.
The temperature on the planet is estimated to be a scorching 1,340 degrees Fahrenheit, Konacki said in an e-mail.
He used the 32-foot-wide Keck One telescope on the Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii to make his discovery. He detected tiny wobbles in the motion of HD 188753 as the gravity of its companions yanked it this way and that.
The discovery of the planet challenges current theories about the formation of giant planets around other stars.
Most astronomers think such planets form in huge disks of gas and dust around young stars.
But a gang of three stars would destroy most of the disk before the planet could form, Konacki said.
HD 188753 is "a conundrum" for theorists, two German astronomers, Artie Hatzes and Gunther Wuchterl.
wrote in a commentary piece in Nature. "This planet should not exist."
But it does.