KELT-4Ab: The Latest Discovered Stable Planet in a Triple Star System

Ahmed Bilal

There are a lot of things beyond our grasp and one of those things is space and its vast array of planets, galaxies and much more. Astronomers are always on the lookout for something great and they have discovered a new stable planet inside a triple star system. This new planet discovery has taken interest off of our solar system for now.

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The newly found planet is called KELT-4Ab and it is only one of four triple star planets ever discovered by astronomers. What exactly is a triple star system is the question that must be in your mind right now. Basically if you stand on the planet’s surface, which you can’t in this case because its surface is made of gas, you would possibly look up to a large gigantic start the planet is itself orbiting around. Other than that you would see two smaller stars which will shine as the Moon and will be seen every day. Two close stars form a binary system and a third orbits them at a distance in a triple star system and their arrangement is hierarchical.

The team of researchers used the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope(KELT) which is basically a pair of two robotically controlled telescopes making it extremely sophisticated and appropriate technology to be used for such a study of systems.

According to the reports, researchers were almost sure that the KELT system consists of only one star, even after discovering things about the KELT system for a long time then. But later they discovered other stars in the system so they had updated it to a binary system and now after further discovery it has been updated to a triple-star system.

According to the latest development of the system it has been stated that there are three stars in order, KELT-A, KELT-B and obviously the third one KELT-C. KELT-A is the one around which the planet KELT 4Ab orbits once every three days. While on the other hand, lying far away from the newly discovered planet, the other two KELT-B and KELT-C orbit each other once every 30 years approximately.

These two far lying stars doesn’t shine the same bright way but they shine as bright as the Moon according to the researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics.

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