Take that, Tatooine! Amateur astronomers taking part in a crowd-sourced science project have discovered a far-off planet that receives light from not one … not two … but four stars.
The Neptune-sized gas giant, named PH1, is the first confirmed exoplanet to be discovered by Planethunters.org, a collaboration of everyday folks working together with astronomers from Yale University.
Poring through data from NASA’s space-based Kepler telescope, two participants, Kian Jek of San Francisco and Robert Gagliano of Cottonwood, Ariz., both saw super-faint dips in brightness as PH1 passed in front of the stars it orbits.
Observing the system further from the Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, the Yale team then confirmed that the bip the amateurs saw was, indeed, a planet. They also described in further detail what PH1 is like. The planet orbits one pair of stars — and in turn is orbited by another pair of stars, at a distance nearly 1000 times that between the Earth and the sun. The stars PH1 orbits are 1.5 and .41 times the mas of our sun, and the planet circles them about every 138 days.