14 DAY TRIAL // Once again, it seems that whatever the imagination of human beings can create, the Universe will match it. Remember the suns of Tatooine, the home planet of Luke Skywalker from "Star Wars"? Well, it seems that something similar really exists out there, and a scientist from Earth has discovered it.
Thus, an extrasolar planet under three suns has been discovered in the constellation Cygnus by a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology using the 10-meter Keck I telescope in Hawaii. The planet is slightly larger than Jupiter and, given that it has to contend with the gravitational pull of three bodies, promises to seriously challenge our current understanding of how planets are formed.
According to a press release from the California Institute of Technology, in the July 14 issue of Nature, Maciej Konacki, a senior postdoctoral scholar in planetary science at Caltech, reports on the discovery of the Jupiter-class planet orbiting the main star of the close-triple-star system known as HD 188753, following a research funded by NASA. The three stars are about 149 light-years from Earth and are about as close to one another as the distance between the sun and Saturn.
Konacki refers to the new type of planet as "Tatooine planets," because of the similarity to Luke Skywalker's view of his home planet's sky in the first Star Wars movie.
"The environment in which this planet exists is quite spectacular," says Konacki. "With three suns, the sky view must be out of this world-literally and figuratively."
However, Konacki adds that the fact that a planet can even exist in a multiple-star system is amazing in itself. Binary and multiple stars are quite common in the solar neigborhood, and in fact outnumber single stars by some 20 percent.
Researchers have found most of the extrasolar planets discovered so far by using a precision velocity technique that is easier to employ on studies of 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.
Konacki's breakthrough was made possible by his development of a novel 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. The planet in the HD 188753 system is the first one from this survey.
"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 says. "Planets from complicated stellar systems will put our theories of planet formation to a strict test. 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," added the scientist.