Recent decades have shown that planets outside our solar system are more common than previously thought, and astronomers have now found evidence of what could be the first known planet orbiting three stars simultaneously.
The system in question, GW Orionis, is located 1,300 light-years away in the constellation Orion and consists of two stars orbiting each other every 241 days, and a third around the other two stars in 11.5 years.
The system is already well known to astronomers because it contains a large protoplanetary disk consisting of three misplaced rings. This is quite unusual, so astronomers wanted to better understand why the rings are skewed.
Astronomy scientists simulation They calculated how the board was arranged so poorly and came to a surprising conclusion: it is not only the torque of the three stars that can cause this, Alternatively, the presence of one or more undiscovered massive planets could make them.
There is a large gap between the inner ring and the other, about 15 billion kilometers wide. Some have tried to explain this huge gap by suggesting that the torques of the three stars caused the distance between the plates, but the team believes their proposal for an unknown planet is more appropriate.
