Astronomy never ceases to amaze us. With every month that passes, discoveries emerge in the field. The more we learn about our nature, the more we grow as individuals.
Exoplanets (planets from other solar systems) have been theorized long ago, but it’s only for a few decades that astronomers found out for sure that they exist. Meanwhile, thousands of them were discovered. But just when some might have started to believe that there’s nothing new to know about exoplanets, a new study leaves us all speechless.
GW Ori enters the cosmic scene
A new study of a solar system named GW Ori revealed a possible exoplanet that could revolve around three stars at the same time. The system is located 1,300 light-years away from Earth, and it was found by astronomers with the help of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory and the Atacama Large Millimetre/submilimetre Array (ALMA).
As a huge disk of dust and gas was found to surround the stars of GW Ori, there was also a gap within it, resulting in two streams of the gas and dust. Furthermore, scientists know that such disks exist around stars to lead to the formation of planets. Therefore, a possible explanation for the gap is the existence of a planet orbiting the stars.
Jeremy Smallwood, who’s the lead author of the paper and also a professor at the University of Nevada, confirmed the hunch while speaking for The New York Times:
It may be the first evidence of a circumtriple planet carving a gap in real-time.
Imagine a world with three sunsets per day. How wonderful can that sound? That’s precisely what’s happening on the planet from the GW Ori star system if the information will be one hundred percent confirmed.
The new study was published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.