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Amateur Team Finds 'Tatooine' Planet with 2 Suns in 4-Star System
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Amateur astronomers have helped discover an alien planet with two suns and a twinkling twist: The entire twin-sun setup, a real-life version of Tatooine from "Star Wars," is orbited by two more stars — a solar system that is the first of its kind known.
Since its initial discovery via Planet Hunters, the existence of PH1 has been confirmed by a team of professional astronomers, who will present their work today (Oct. 15) at the annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society in Reno, Nev.
With a radius about 6.2 times that of Earth's, PH1 is a smidge bigger than Neptune. The gassy planet spends 138 days completing a single orbit around its two parent stars, which have masses about 1.5 and 0.41 times that of the sun. The stars circle each other once every 20 days.
The two other stars orbiting the PH1's twin suns are about 1,000 astronomical units (AU) from the parent stars. (One AU is about the distance between the Earth and sun, about 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers.)
If you're hoping to catch the quadruple sunset, this may not be your best bet. The researchers estimate PH1's temperature would range from a minimum of about 484 degrees Fahrenheit (524 Kelvin, or 251 degrees Celsius) and a maximum of 644 degrees F (613 Kelvin, or 340 degrees C), too hot to be in the habitable zone.
[link to www.space.com]
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