Many new discoveries in space, new wonders that show the unfathomable nature of Creation, continue to confound man. One of them is the recent discovery of an alien planet called "KELT-4Ab"—a planet with not just one, not two, but three suns.
Space scientists led by Jason Eastman, a research associate at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, discovered this rare planet, which is estimated to be as massive as Jupiter.
While other astronomers have earlier spotted planets with two suns, KELT-4Ab is unique in the sense that it revolves around one star, KELT-A, which in turn is orbited by a nearby pair of stars. Thus, it has three suns in total.
In fact, Eastman explained that this alien planet's secondary stars, called KELT-B and KELT-C, are close enough that they appear as bright as full moons in the sky.
"Those two stars would orbit each other every about 30 years, and every 4,000 years they'd make one orbit around KELT-4A," the lead researcher said in a report on Fox News.
In their research published on The Astronomical Journal, the astronomers explained how they were able to locate KELT-4Ab—the fourth known system to contain three stars.
They used the two robotic telescopes that make up the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT), located in Arizona and South Africa respectively, to spot the overheated planet, its main star, and the twin stars orbiting it.
KELT-4Ab is also unique in another way: it is considered one of the "hot Jupiters" or gas giants that lie close to their parent star.
"Hot Jupiters aren't supposed to exist. None of them. Gaseous planets the size of Jupiter are supposed to form much farther out [from their parent star] and stay there, like our own Jupiter did," Eastman explained.
"Exactly how they got so close is an outstanding question, but one theory is that it migrates due to hot interactions with a third body — in this case, the third and fourth bodies KELT-BC," he added.
