Scientists have discovered a massive exoplanet that has twice as many suns as Tatooine.
Astronomers have long since determined that binary star systems, like the one Luke Skywalker's home planet has, are real, but new observations has spotted a planet with four suns. Authors of a study published in the Astrophysical Journal determined the view from the planet would be of one main star, a second bright red one and two small white dots locked in a binary system.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the planet is 125 million light years from Earth and is a jarring 10 times larger than Jupiter. It also apparently does not have an actual surface, so looking up at the planet's stars would require a spacecraft.
"Star systems come in myriad forms. There can be single stars, binary stars, triple stars, even quintuple star systems," study lead author Lewis Roberts, a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) astronomer, said in a press release. "It's amazing the way nature puts these things together."
Dubbed "30 Ari," the planet was first spotted years ago and astronomers believed at the time it only had three stars. Using the Palomar Observatory in San Diego, the study authors took another look after applying certain upgrade and noticed one star was actually two.
Ari 30 laps its primary star once every three days and the other stars were determined to be close enough to have an influence on the planet.
"You can almost get to the quality of what you would get from a telescope in space," Roberts told the Times. "So now we can pick out faint stars that couldn't be seen before.
"There are other known quadruple systems - there are even known quintuple systems.
"As we find more and more exoplanets, we'll probably find some of them in systems like these."
