Astronomers Discover FIRST Ever Planet Orbiting Three Stars At Once!

 

For thousands of years the greatest

 minds of the time believed that the sun revolved around earth when it's

 actually the other way around

 and now we are discovering other planets that revolve around not one not two but three three large magnificent stars all at once welcome to Science Reads and today we'll be talking about an exciting discovery of the first known planet to orbit three stars at the same time finding the center ever since the dawn of man we've been searching for answers in the immensity of the skies there are cave paintings dating 30,000 years that depict many of the constellations we are familiar with to this day we have found patterns in the stars we created epic and harrowing mythologies based on those patterns that resonate to the core of what makes us human this was our first attempt to make sense of the grand mysteries that stood above us and though we have come far from those early days inside those caves there are still a plethora of mysteries to be uncovered even the greatest thinkers in ancient Greece were able to create a somewhat accurate model that predicted the retrograde of the sun moon and other planets with enough accuracy to put everyone at ease this model of the cosmos lasted for thousands of years it wasn't until 1543 in Europe where this model was seriously challenged by the brilliant mind of Nicolas Copernicus in his then controversial publication titled on the revolutions of the heavenly spheres he posed the idea that the earth was not at the center of everything it was the sun of course his paper was dismissed by many during this time mainly because his model was just as accurate as the geocentric model that everyone had used for hundreds of years but also because there was pushback and pressure from the catholic church to keep these new findings in the dark it wasn't until 1609 that johannes kepler discovered that the orbits of the planets revolving around the sun are not perfectly circular he came across this discovery after trying to make sense of the movement of mars in the skies kepler realized that the planets traveled in stretched out circles known as ellipses the sun didn't sit exactly at the center of their orbit but instead lay off to the sides with this major breakthrough we were able to create a detailed and accurate description of the trajectory of the planets where the sun was finally placed at the center as we all know it to this day and though that model has served us to find thousands of exoplanets across various galaxies we were unprepared for what was to come in the next few centuries the discovery of the first twin stars though once we believe that binary star systems were extremely rare thanks to recent observations by our numerous telescopes around the globe we have concluded that this is not the case at all in fact according to nasa it is estimated that throughout the entire universe a whopping 40 to 60 percent of stars out there reside in multi-star systems there are those who claim it could be up to 85 percent due to the fact that many believe that when star systems are born at first they may have two or more small suns orbiting one another but over millions of years some eventually crash with one another and make a single massive sun these star systems would be expected to have a unique type of orbit called circum and though we have been aware of the existence of planets orbiting multiple stars we had detected a few all the way back in the mid 1990s but it wasn't until recently in January 2020 that we were officially able to witness the first exoplanet in a binary star system officially known as TOI 1338b this planet is located approximately 1300 light years away from earth in the constellation of Pector it was observed by TESS the

 Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite

 the transiting exoplanet survey satellite is a space telescope for nasa's explorers program designed to search for exoplanets using the transit method in an area 400 times larger than that covered by the Kepler telescope the transit method of detecting exoplanets looks for dips in the visible light of stars and requires that planets cross in front of stars along our line of sight to them repetitive periodic dibs can reveal a planet or planets orbiting a star at one point a star system like this was thought of only as science fiction perhaps most famously depicted in George Lucas's star wars in 1977 if you were to stand on the surface of TOI 1338b you would see something very similar depicted in the film though that would be an amazing sight to behold it is unlikely that anyone could survive on the harsh surface of this exoplanet TOI 1338b is about 6.9 times the size of earth it also has 33 times the mass of our own planet and it orbits both of its stars every 95.2 days speaking of its stars one of them is very comparable to our sun the other is just the tiny red dwarf roughly one-third the size of our sun those two stars orbit one another every 14.6 days out of roughly two dozen currently known circum-binary planets 12 were discovered by nasa's Kepler space telescope a satellite that was ultimately responsible for finding more than 2 300 exoplanets however a disadvantage of kepler's otherworldly catalog is that many of the exoplanets it found are too distant for astronomers to study in detail something that the transiting exoplanet survey satellite has been able to solve an overly complicated orbit if a Tatooine-like world sounds a little too crazy to believe what if i told you that recently we may have found a planet that is orbiting not two but three stars at the same time in 2017 a team led by Jung Ching b and Yanke Vander Merrell with the university of Victoria in Canada use the Atacama large millimeter array or alma telescope in Chile to get a closer look at GW Ori a suspected exoplanet located almost 1300 light years away from us in the head of the constellation of Orion thanks to its ability to inspect electromagnetic radiation at a submillimeter level we have been able to learn more details about this oddly behaving stellar object though this star system is relatively young this could prove to be one of the most incredible discoveries we have made in the last decade we know that the majority of stars are composed of two or more stars but that doesn't mean that they all have exoplanets orbiting them it is thought to be rare to have planets orbit multiple stars because their trajectories could be so wild that it would be almost impossible for a planet to form under such chaotic circumstances and what could be more chaotic than a planet orbiting three stars though we have found plenty of exoplanets in solar systems with three stars in the past perhaps most famously koi 5ab these exoplanets though rare and fascinating only tend to orbit one of the stars in a multi-solar system while GW Ori orbits all three of its stars GW Ori is one of the most oddly shaped interstellar arrangements that astronomers have witnessed two stars are orbiting one another while a third star zooms around the pair at a distance of hundreds of millions of miles away a massive protoplanetary disk surrounds this triple star system this disc is a dense region of gas and dust that's left over from the formation of these young stars and has not yet been blown away by their stellar winds the reason scientists call it a protoplanetary disk is because the remains of this material could someday form a planet not only that but this disc is absolutely massive it has three rings each with a different angle the outermost ring is about 400 astronomical units which is roughly around 10 times the distance from Pluto to our sun the researchers used computer models to simulate this unique stellar system they also considered the idea that the gap could be a byproduct of the torque of the three stars pulling on each other the other option was that it could be a planet or planets massive enough to carve out the space in the ring of dust after running several different simulations it was concluded that the torque formed from the three stars was not enough to cause the break in the disc the scientists then concluded that the gap is more likely due to undetected planets it may be only a matter of months before we get confirmation of the existence of the first exoplanet in a circumtriple orbit if this is confirmed and there is in fact an exoplanet in the GW Ori system it could throw into question our previous assumptions of the rarity of this type of system and perhaps there could be trillions of more exoplanets than we thought possible thank you all for reading i hope

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