Astronomers have discovered a giant planet with four suns just 125 light-years from Earth.

The planet is at least 10 times as big as Jupiter and scientists say it probably has no actual surface to stand on. But, if you could fly a spacecraft into its atmosphere and look up, you would see one primary sun, a bright red dot, and another star shining more brightly than Venus does in our night sky.

If you pulled out a telescope, the smallest white star would be revealed to be a binary system of two stars.

"It would depend on what kind of sky you had, but chances are that at least one of them would be up at any given time," said Lewis Roberts, an astronomer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who helped discover the rare quadruple system.

Astronomers discovered the system known as 30 Ari several years ago, but until recently they thought it was composed of one planet and three stars. They were only able to make out the fourth star in the group after fitting the telescopes at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego with a Robo-AO adaptive optics system.


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[link to www.latimes.com]