Exceptionally rare planet with three suns may lurk in Orion's nose
By Brandon Specktor about 3 hours ago
A Jupiter-sized world may be kicking up dust in the triple-star system GW Ori.
GW Orionis has three stars centered within three wobbly rings of dust. Astronomers think there could be a rare, three-sun planet in the mix too. (Image credit: ESO/L. Calçada, Exeter/Kraus et al.)
There's now even more evidence that a bizarre star system perched on the constellation Orion's nose may contain the rarest type of planet in the known universe: a single world orbiting three suns simultaneously.
The star system, known as GW Orionis (or GW Ori) and located about 1,300 light-years from Earth, makes a tempting target for study; with three dusty, orange rings nested inside one another, the system literally looks like a giant bull's-eye in the sky. At the center of that bull's-eye live three stars two locked in a tight binary orbit with each other, and a third swirling widely around the other two.
Triple-star systems are rare in the cosmos, but GW Ori gets even weirder the closer astronomers look. In a 2020 paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers took a close look at GW Ori with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile, and discovered that the system's three dust rings are actually misaligned with one another, with the innermost ring wobbling wildly in its orbit.
The three dusty rings of GW Orionis, a triple star solar system in the Orion constellation. The wobbly inner ring may contain a young planet. (Image credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), S. Kraus & J. Bi; NRAO/AUI/NSF, S. Dagnello)
The team proposed that a young planet, or the makings of one, could be throwing off the gravitational balance of GW Ori's intricate triple-ring arrangement. If the detection is confirmed, it would be the first triple-sun planet (or "circumtriple" planet ) in the known universe. Eat your heart out, Tatooine!
More:
https://www.livescience.com/triple-star-planet-orion-simulations