BBC News, Paul
Rincon, Science editor, 15 October 2012
 |
| The new planet - a gas giant - is about six times the size of Earth |
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Astronomers
have found a planet whose skies are illuminated by four different suns - the
first known of its type.
The distant
world orbits one pair of stars and has a second stellar pair revolving around
it.
The
discovery was made by volunteers using the Planethunters.org website along with
a team from UK and US institutes; follow-up observations were made with the
Keck Observatory.
A
scientific paper has been posted on the Arxiv pre-print server.
The planet,
located just under 5,000 light-years away, has been named PH1 after the Planet
Hunters site.
It is
thought to be a "gas giant" slightly larger than Neptune but more
than six times the size of the Earth.
"You
don't have to go back too far before you would have got really good odds
against one of these systems existing," Dr Chris Lintott, from the
University of Oxford, told BBC News.
"All
four stars pulling on it creates a very complicated environment. Yet there it
sits in an apparently stable orbit.
"That's
really confusing, which is one of the things which makes this discovery so fun.
It's absolutely not what we would have expected."
Binary
stars - systems with pairs of stars - are not uncommon. But only a handful of
known exoplanets (planets that circle other stars) have been found to orbit
such binaries. And none of these are known to have another pair of stars
circling them.
 |
| Follow-up observations were made with the Keck facility on Mauna Kea |
Dr Lintott
said: "There are six other well-established planets around double stars,
and they're all pretty close to those stars. So I think what this is telling us
is planets can form in the inner parts of protoplanetary discs (the torus of
dense gas that gives rise to planetary systems).
"The
planets are forming close in and are able to cling to a stable orbit there.
That probably has implications for how planets form elsewhere."
 |
Kepler Space Telescope
Stares fixedly at a patch corresponding
to 1/400th of the sky
Looks at more than 155,000 stars
Has so far found 2,321 candidate planets
Among them are 207 Earth-sized planets,
10 of which are in the "habitable zone" where liquid water can exist |
PH1 was
discovered by two US volunteers using the Planethunters.org website: Kian Jek
of San Francisco and Robert Gagliano from Cottonwood, Arizona.
They spotted
faint dips in light caused by the planet passing in front of its parent stars.
The team of professional astronomers then confirmed the discovery using the
Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
Founded in
2010, Planethunters.org aims to harness human pattern recognition to identify
transits in publicly available data gathered by Nasa's Kepler Space Telescope.
Kepler was
launched in March 2009 to search for Earth-like planets orbiting other stars.
Visitors to
the Planet Hunters website have access to randomly selected data from one of
Kepler's target stars.
Volunteers
are asked to draw boxes to mark the locations of visible transits - when a
planet passes in front of its parent star.
Dr Lintott
points out: "Computerised attempts to find things [in the data] missed
this system entirely. That tells you there are probably more of these that are
slipping through our fingers. We've just stuck a load of new data up on
Planethunters.org to help people find the next one."
Searching
for such systems, he said, was "a complicated test to hand a
computer", adding: "We're using human pattern recognition, which can
disentangle that reasonably well to see the important stuff."
Since
December 2010, more than 170,000 members of the public have participated in the
project.
Paul.Rincon-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk
“… The
entire galaxy revolves as one plate, in a very counter-intuitive way. The stars
and the constellations do not orbit within the rules of Newtonian physics that
you are used to seeing all around you in your own solar system. For the stars
and clusters in your galaxy, distance from the center does not matter. All the
stars rotate as one. This is because the galaxy is entangled with the middle of
itself. In that state, there is no time or distance. The change of
consciousness on this planet has changed the center of the galaxy. This is
because what happens here, dear one, is "known" by the center.
It's
interesting to us what your reaction to all this is scientifically. You saw
that the "creative event" of your Universe is missing some energy in
order for it to have formed as it did. In addition, the unusual way the galaxy
rotates, as I just stated, was also noted. So you have calculated that for all
this to be in place, there has to be missing 3D matter, and you have given it a
name - dark matter. How funny! Did you ever think that there could be a
multidimensional effect going on that you now can observe and calculate - that
has immense power, but can't be seen? It's not "matter" at all and
it's not 3D. It's quantum energy.
Let me tell
you something about physics. Yet again, I'll make it simple. Everything your
scientists have seen in physics happens in pairs. At the moment, there are four
laws of physics in your three-dimensional paradigm. They represent two pairs of
energy types. Eventually, there will be six. At the center of your galaxy is
what you call a black hole, but it is not a single thing. It is a duality.
There is no such thing as "singularity". You might say it's one
energy with two parts - a weak and a strong quantum force. And the strangest
thing is it knows who you are. It is the creator engine. It's different in
other galaxies than this one. It's unique.
The very
physics of your galaxy is postured by what you do here. The astronomers can
look into the cosmos and they will discover different physics in different galaxies.
Could it be that there's something going on in the other galaxies like this
one? I'm not going to answer that. …”
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