Massive Planet Found with Three Suns has Triple Sunsets and Sunrises (+Video)

Massive Planet Found with Three Suns has Triple Sunsets and Sunrises

Luke Skywalker’s home planet, Tatooine, in the Star Wars saga, was a strange world with two suns in the sky, but astronomers have now found a planet in an even more exotic system, where an observer would either experience constant daylight or enjoy triple sunrises and sunsets each day, depending on the seasons, which last longer than human lifetimes.

Located about 320 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Centaurus (The Centaur), HD 131399Ab is about 16 million years old, making it also one of the youngest exoplanets discovered to date, and one of very few directly imaged planets. 

For about half of the planet’s orbit, which lasts 550 Earth-years, three stars are visible in the sky, the fainter two always much closer together, and changing in apparent separation from the brightest star throughout the year.  

For much of the planet’s year the stars appear close together, giving it a familiar night-side and day-side with a unique triple-sunset and sunrise each day. As the planet orbits and the stars grow farther apart each day, they reach a point where the setting of one coincides with the rising of the other.

“HD 131399Ab is one of the few exoplanets that have been directly imaged, and it’s the first one in such an interesting dynamical configuration,” said Daniel Apai, from the University of Arizona, USA, and one of the co-authors of the new paper.
The results were published online in the journal Science on 7 July 2016.

THE VERGE
http://tinyurl.com/zvpqo5

ESO
http://tinyurl.com/hwms4cw

Clips images credit: ESO, ESA.HUBBLE & NASA