Astronomer's three-star find

Tim Radford, science editor
Thursday July 14, 2005
The Guardian

An astronomer has identified a planet with three suns far away in the galaxy - the first of a class dubbed "Tatooine planets" after the home of Luke Skywalker, the young hero of the Star Wars films.

Maciej Konacki, of the California Institute of Technology, describes in Nature today how he trained a 10-metre telescope on three stars 149 light years from Earth, and found they shared a planet slightly larger than Jupiter.

The stars are about as close to each other as Saturn is to the sun. "The environment in which this planet exists is quite spectacular," Dr Konacki said. "With three suns, the sky view must be out of this world, literally and figuratively."

In this region of the galaxy binary stars and even multiple star systems - heavenly bodies caught in a complex gravitational waltz - are more frequent than single stars.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/space/article/0,14493,1528056,00.html

I guess, a planet around such a system would have a complex orbit...subjecting it to large variations in temperature and gravity. Will this be conducive to life as we know it?

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In this region of the galaxy binary stars and even multiple star systems - heavenly bodies caught in a complex gravitational waltz - are more frequent than single stars.

But no one expected that a planet could either form or survive for long in a group of triple suns. No life could survive there, but the outlook from the planet, linked to the main star, HD 188753, would be pretty bright.

The main star, like the sun, is yellow; the larger of the other two is orange, the smaller red. A day on the mystery planet would be lurid, but its year would be brief as it completes its annual orbit in three and a half Earth days.
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It sounds like the planet is extremely close to one star, since its orbital period is three and a half days. The other stars are the distance of Saturn from the main star. So it sounds like the planet has a standard Keplerian (elliptical, almost circular) orbit around the primary star, with minimal gravitational influence from the other stars.

Still, I suspect the planet's orbit isn't stable over more than a few million years, with even slight perturbations from the other stars.

An artist's conception of the view from a hypothetical moon orbiting the planet.


A model overhead view of the system. The planet orbits very closely to the central star.

More at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2005-115

The search for another earth.
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OVERVIEW
The search begins...
Are we alone?

For centuries, human beings have pondered this question. Medieval scholars speculated that other worlds must exist and that some would harbor other forms of life.
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Artist's concept of an Earth-like planet
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Finally, the Terrestrial Planet Finder will build upon the legacy of all that have gone before it. With an imaging power 100 times greater than the Hubble Space Telescope, Terrestrial Planet Finder will send back the first photographs of nearby planetary systems.

We will analyze the atmospheres of these distant worlds, looking for carbon dioxide, water and ozone. The substantial presence of all three gasses would suggest that life is present.

Such a discovery would at last provide convincing evidence that we are not alone.

We will have found another Earth.
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http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/overview/overview_index.html

Reality always turns out to be far more amazing than anything we could ever imagine.

about religion !

I am blown away by an ant hill in my backyard and the mockingbird that sings all night outside my window.

Who needs to make stuff up?