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

(Image credit: Twitter.com/science)

last updated 8 July 2016

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.

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."

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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