Astronomers have discovered a new planet with three suns – Interfax

Moscow. July 8. INTERFAX.RU – Scientists have discovered yupiteropodobnuyu exoplanet in a triple star system. This discovery -. A rarity, as the number of known planets in such systems at the moment does not exceed five, writes N + 1 with reference to the journal Science

The planet HD 131399Ab was detected by spectropolarimetric receiver high contrast SPHERE which is mounted on the Very Large Telescope. Its main task is to search for and characterization of giant exoplanets orbiting nearby stars, and the method of research is to obtain direct images of planets, which is quite a difficult task because of the dimness of the planet compared to the parent star.

Exoplanet is in the ternary system HD 131399 star, which is part of the OB-Scorpius-Centaurus association – the nearest to the Sun gravitationally weakly bound groups of young stars. The stars of this system are similar to the Sun’s mass (1.82, 0.96 and 0.6 solar masses) and are from us at a distance of 320 ± 20 light years. Exoplanet orbits the star HD 131399A, which, in turn, rotates around a common center of mass together in the two other components of the system

Open Planet -. One of the low-mass (which is about four times the mass of Jupiter) and cold exoplanets discovered by the direct receipt of photos. Its surface temperature reaches about 580 degrees Celsius. In addition, it strongly enough removed from the parent star – according to scientists, the distance between them is about 60-100 astronomical units

Thus, the planet is about twice as far as Pluto.. A full revolution around the Sun is its planet makes for 550 Earth years, and about half that time with HD 131399Ab can observe all three stars. In addition, due to changes in positions of the stars as they rotate around a common center of mass, and because of the rotation of the planet about 140 Earth years on the planet is “polar day”.

Scientists are not yet able to say, how stable the whole system, since it requires an additional observation. They also can not explain why the exoplanet discovered is so far away. For example, the recently discovered planet KELT-4Ab, belonging to the class of hot Jupiters, makes a complete revolution around its parent star in just three days.