An international team of amateur and professional astronomers has discovered a planet whose skies are lit up by four suns - the first reported case of such a phenomenon - posted on the ARXIV PRE-PRINT SERVER and announced Monday, October 15, 2012 The planet, located about 5000 light years from Earth, has been dubbed PH1 in honor of Planet Hunters, a program led by Yale University in the United States which enlists volunteers to look for signs of new planets, reports the BBC, IO9 AND NASA JPL/CIT. PH1 is orbiting two suns, and in turn is orbited by a second distant pair of stars. Only six planets are known to orbit two stars, researchers say, and none of those are orbited by other distant stars. A gas giant, PH1 has a radius about 6.2 times that of Earth, making it a bit bigger than Neptune. It orbits a pair of eclipsing stars that are 1.5 and 0.41 times the mass of the sun roughly every 138 days. 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 after the review of the Kepler spacecraft data.
Yeah we all shine on like the moon, and the stars, and the sun [and PH1]. -John Lennon
