Astronomers discover 16-million-year-old planet with 3 suns

Using the Very Large Telescope in Chile, astronomers were able to make a Very Large Discovery: A 16-million-year-old planet with three suns, 320 light years away from Earth.

Planet HD 131399Ab is in the constellation Centaurus, and takes 600 years to orbit its main sun. Depending on the season, the planet either experiences constant daylight or triple sunrises and sunsets, and it is gaseous like Jupiter, scientists wrote in a study published Thursday in the journal Science.

The planet was discovered a year ago, and researchers have only been able to study a tiny bit of its elliptical orbit. It's one of the youngest exoplanets scientists know of, and it's possible it has moons. "It has quite high temperatures, no liquid water, extremely powerful winds, and no surface; just below the uppermost layer of the atmosphere it rains liquid iron droplets," Daniel Apai of the University of Arizona, a co-author of the study, told USA Today. "Earth-like life — life as we know it — would be extremely unlikely, if not impossible, to exist in this atmosphere."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up