Another Triple Sun System Discovered

[sherlew99]

Triple Sunset: Planet Discovered in 3-Star System

by Michael Schirber, Staff Writer | July 13, 2005 01:00pm ET



A newly discovered planet has bountiful sunshine, with not one, not two, but three suns glowing in its sky.

It is the first extrasolar planet found in a system with three stars. How a planet was born amidst these competing gravitational forces will be a challenge for planet formation theories.

"The environment in which this planet exists is quite spectacular," said Maciej Konacki from the California Institute of Technology. "With three suns, the sky view must be out of this world -- literally and figuratively."

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Wow, missed this one.

[sherlew99]

More have been discovered here recently.

Exoplanet in a triple star system smack dab in the habitable zone
By Phil Plait | February 7, 2012 7:00 am

In the race to find the weirdest planet orbiting another star, we may have a front runner: GJ 667Cc, a super-Earth orbiting one star in a triple system that’s actually relatively closeby. And oh yeah: it just so happens to be in just the right spot to be potentially inhabitable!

Of course, I have some caveats, so don’t get too excited. But this is a weird and pretty cool one!

GJ 667 is a triple star system that’s right in our back yard as these things go: it’s only about 22 light years away, making it one of the closest star systems in the sky. It’s composed of two stars a bit smaller and cooler than the Sun which orbit each other closely, and a third, smaller star orbiting the pair about 35 billion km (20 billion miles) out. Stars in multiple systems get capital letters to distinguish them, so the two in the binary are GJ 667 A and B, and the third one is GJ 667C.

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[sherlew99]

And of course the first triple-star system we discovered may have planets as well.

Alpha Centauri Triple Star System --Does It Harbor Habitable Planets Closest to Earth?

With the diminishing odds that our solar system supports advanced forms of life, the nearest stars become ever more attractive candidates for discovery. And among the stars with possible habitable planets is the Alpha Centauri triple star system, the closest star system at only 4.37 light years from our Sun, which hangs above the horizon of Saturn in the image above. Both Alpha Centauri A and B (shown in image above) -- stars very similar to our own Sun -- are clearly distinguishable in the image. (The third star in the Alpha Centauri system, the red dwarf Proxima Centauri, see below, is not visible here.)

From the orbit of Saturn, light (as well as Cassini's radio signal) takes a little more than an hour travel to Earth. The distance to Alpha Centauri is so great that light from these stars takes more than four years to reach our Solar System. Thus, although Saturn seems a distant frontier, the nearest star is almost 30,000 times farther away.

Astronomers have focused in on Alpha Centauri as a potential zone for Earthlike planets. During October of 2012, European astronomers discovered a planet with about the mass of the Earth orbiting a star in the Alpha Centauri system — the nearest to Earth. It is also the lightest exoplanet ever discovered around a star like the Sun. The planet was detected using the HARPS instrument on the 3.6-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. Alpha Centauri A is the brightest component, Alpha Centauri B is the slightly fainter second star and Alpha Centauri C is the much fainter Proxima Centauri. Proxima Centauri is slightly closer to Earth than A or B and hence is formally the closest star.

Click here

[sherlew99]

[sherlew99]

[pickinduck]

We are close to having 2 Suns. Jupiter has been referred to as a failed Sun. It still puts out A LOT of radiation.

[sherlew99]

People have referred to Jupiter as a 'failed star,' but according to Scientific American that isn't quite true.

"Nearly all scientists who study the formation of planets believe that Jupiter formed in a very different manner than stars form, so that calling Jupiter a 'failed star' is misleading. Stars form directly from the collapse of dense clouds of interstellar gas and dust. Because of rotation, these clouds form flattened disks that surround the central, growing stars. After the star has nearly reached its final mass, by accreting gas from the disk, the leftover matter in the disk is free to form planets.

"Jupiter is generally believed to have formed in a two-step process. First, a vast swarm of ice and rock 'planetesimals' formed. These comet-sized bodies collided and accumulated into ever-larger planetary embryos. Once an embryo became about as massive as ten Earths, its self-gravity became strong enough to pull in gas directly from the disk. During this second step, the proto-Jupiter gained most of its present mass (a total of 318 times the mass of the Earth). Soon thereafter, the disk gas was removed by the intense early solar wind, before Saturn could grow to a similar size."

link

[pickinduck]

What about Jupiter putting out so much radiation?

[sherlew99]

Ah I found an excellent article about Jupiter on Space.com. It covers the radiation emanating from the planet as well.

Jupiter - facts and information about the planet Jupiter

[pickinduck]

Hey, that article said Jupiter is a failed Sun.

[sherlew99]

Yeah, I noticed that. Whatever you want to call it, there just wasn't enough star-forming material for two stars to form in this solar system.