The
planet, located about 5,000 light years from Earth, has been dubbed PH1 in
honor of Planet Hunters, a programme led by Yale University in the United
States, which enlists volunteers to look for signs of new planets.
PH1 is
orbiting two suns, and in turn is orbited by a second distant pair of stars.
Only six planets are known to orbit two stars, researchers say, and none of
those are orbited by other distant stars.
"Circumbinary
planets are the extremes of planet formation," said Yale's Meg Schwamb,
lead author of a paper presented Monday at the annual meeting of the Division
for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society in Nevada.
"The
discovery of these systems is forcing us to go back to the drawing board to
understand how such planets can assemble and evolve in these dynamically
challenging environments."
US
citizen scientists and Planet Hunters participants Kian Jek and Robert Gagliano
were the first to identify PH1. Their observations were then confirmed by a
team of US and British researchers working in Hawaii.
PH1 is a
gas giant with a radius about 6.2 times that of Earth, making it slightly
larger than Neptune. It orbits a pair of eclipsing stars that are 1.5 and 0.41
times the mass of the Sun roughly every 138 days.
The two
other stars are orbiting the planetary system at a distance that is roughly
1,000 times the distance between Earth and the Sun.
The
Planethunters.org website was created in 2010 to encourage amateur astronomers
to identify planets outside our solar system, using data from the US space
agency NASA's Kepler space telescope.
Kepler,
launched in March 2009, is NASA's first mission in search of Earth-like planets
orbiting stars similar to our Sun.
The
discovery of PH1 was made available online Monday at the site arxiv.org and has
been submitted to the Astrophysical Journal for publication.
"It
still continues to astonish me how we can detect, let alone glean so much
information, about another planet thousands of light-years away just by
studying the light from its parent star," Jek said.
Last
week scientists reported the discovery of a "diamond planet" twice
the size of earth and orbiting a sun-like star.
Up to
one-third of the planet's mass and much of its surface is believed to consist
of diamonds, implying that distant rocky planets can no longer be assumed to
have the same features as Earth.
-source: msn.com.ph
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