Original discovery of a planet with four suns

ILLUSTRATION. This new giant gaseous planet the same size as Neptune, called PH1, located about 5000 light years from Earth

An international team of astronomers announced Monday the discovery of a planet where the sky is illuminated by four suns. This is the first system of this type observed stellar so far. The planet, called PH1, located about 5000 light years from Earth in orbit around two suns and two stars revolve around them. Only six planets known to date to be orbiting two suns orbiting another star remote their solar system, according to the astronomers.

 This dual circumbinary planetary system was originally discovered by two American astronomers, Kian Jek and Robert Gagliano, who used the site Planethunters.org. Professional astronomers American and British then made observations and measurements with Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. "The circumbinary planets are there in the most extreme planetary formation," notes Meg Schwamb, a researcher at Yale University (Connecticut, northeast), lead author of the research presented at the annual conference Division of planetology American Astronomical Society meeting in Reno, Nevada. "The discovery of such stellar systems forces us to rethink how these planets can form and grow in such an environment," he added in a statement.

This discovery has been posted on the website arXiv.org and has been submitted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. PH1 is a giant gaseous planet the same size as Neptune, representing about six times that of the Earth revolves around the first two stars, a mass by 1.5 and 0.41 times that of our sun, 138 days. The other two stars revolve around this planetary system at a distance of about a thousand times that of the Earth and the Sun.

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