Gorgeous triple sunset on newfound planet?

<body leftmargin="0" bgcolor="#000060" text="#FFFFFF" link="#FFFF00" vlink="#FF9900"> <b> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="5">Gorgeous triple sunset on newfound planet?</font></p> </b> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="1">July 13, 2005<br> Courtesy the California Institute of Technology<br> and World Science staff<br> </font> <font size="2" face="Arial"> <b> <br> </b> </font> <b><font size="2" face="Arial">A newfound planet has three suns, a scientist says—a discovery that highlights the unimagined beauties the cosmos still has in store for us, suggests planets are even more common than previously believed, and could rewrite theories of planet formation.</font></b> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><font size="2" face="Arial">A scientist at the California Institute of Technology found the planet in the direction of the constellation Cygnus (The Swan), according to a paper published in the July 14 issue of the research journal <i>Nature</i>.<br> </font></b></p> <div align="right"> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="28%" style="float: left; border-right: 3 solid #000000; border-top: 3 solid #000000; border-bottom: 3 solid #000000; padding-left: 3; padding-right: 3; padding-top: 3; padding-bottom: 6" bgcolor="#800080" bordercolor="#000000"> <tr> <td width="100%"><b><font face="Arial" size="4">Viewing the animation</font></b><p><font face="Arial" size="2">Researchers released an artist’s animation of a sunset in the triple-star system where they say a new planet was found.</font> <p><font face="Arial" size="2">Click <a href="http://pr.caltech.edu/media/trinary_sunset-high.mov" target="_blank">here</a> for a high-resolution and <a href="http://pr.caltech.edu/media/trinary_sunset-low.mov" target="_blank">here</a> for a low-resolution version of the movie, which is in Quicktime format.</font><p><font face="Arial" size="2">For aesthetic reasons, the animation shows the scene as it would appear not from the newfound planet itself, but from a fictitious rocky moon of that planet.</font> <p><font face="Arial" size="2"><b>If you cannot view the movie </b>(such as if you get a “broken Quicktime icon”) you may be able to fix the problem by downloading the latest free version of Quicktime <a href="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/win.html" target="_blank">here</a>.<br> </font></td> </tr> </table> </div> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><font size="2" face="Arial">The planet is slightly larger than Jupiter, researchers said, and the fact that it’s being pulled in three different directions by the gravitation of nearby stars makes it hard to see how it survives.<br> <br> The finding promises to “seriously challenge our current understanding of how planets are formed,” according to an emailed statement from the Institute.<br> <br> In the paper, Maciej Konacki, a senior postdoctoral scholar at the institute, said the planet orbits only one star of a triple-star system known as HD 188753. It doesn’t orbit the other two, so these aren’t its “suns” in the traditional sense of being stars around which it orbits. But they do orbit the same, main star that the planet also orbits.<br> <br> The three stars are about 149 light-years from Earth. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year. The stars are about as close to one another as the distance between the sun and Saturn, he added.<br> <br> A viewer on the planet would see three bright “suns,” according to Konacki. One of these three suns, the one that the planet orbits, would look huge, he added. This is because the planet is extremely close to that star, and as a result, orbits it very quickly: its year is only 3½ days long. That star would also be yellow, being similar to our own sun. <br> <br> The larger of the other two suns would be orange, and the smaller red, Konacki said.<br> <br> Konacki refers to the new type of planet as “Tatooine planets,” because a the similarity to Luke Skywalker’s view of his home planet’s sky in the first Star Wars movie. That one, however, had a paltry two suns.<br> <br> “The environment in which this planet exists is quite spectacular,” said Konacki. “With three suns, the sky view must be out of this world-literally and figuratively.”<br> <br> The fact that a planet can even exist in a multiple-star system is amazing in itself, he added. Double-, triple- and multiple stars are quite common in our neigborhood, and in fact outnumber single stars by some 20 percent.<br> <br> Researchers have found most of the extrasolar planets discovered so far by using a precision velocity technique that is easier use with single stars. Experts generally avoided close-binary and close-multiple stars because the existing planet detection techniques fail for such complicated systems, and also because theories of solar-system formation suggested that planets were very unlikely to form in such environments.<br> <br> Konacki said he made his discovery by developing a new method that allows him to precisely measure velocities of all members of close-binary and close-multiple-star systems. He used the technique for a search for extrasolar planets in such systems with the Keck I telescope in Hawaii. The planet in the HD 188753 system is the first one from this survey. <br> <br> “If we believe that the same basic processes lead to the formation of planets around single stars and components of multiple stellar systems, then such processes should be equally feasible, regardless of the presence of stellar companions,” Konacki said. “Planets from complicated stellar systems will put our theories of planet formation to a strict test.”<br> <br> Scientists in 1995 discovered the first “hot Jupiter,” a planet outside our Solar System that is a giant, like Jupiter, and that orbits very close to its parent star. Today, more than 20 such planets are known to orbit other stars. <br> <br> These planets are believed to form in a disk of gas and dust that extends beyond three astronomical units, or three times the 93-million-mile distance between the sun and Earth. After formation, these planets are believed to migrate inward to their present very close orbits.<br> <br> But this doesn’t explain how a planet forms in a system such as the one Konacki identified. If another star closely orbits the star with the disk, scientists believe the other star would pull away material from the disk, leaving too little material for a planet to form.<br> <br> “How that planet formed in such a complicated setting is very puzzling. I believe there is yet much to be learned about how giant planets are formed,” said Konacki.</font></b></p> </body>