In the Star Wars universe, Tatooine stands as one of the driest planets in existence because it orbits two stars instead of only one. This is why the planet is seen in the films as nothing more than just a seemingly endless desert with not much water around.
While Tatooine may only be a work of fiction, the product of George Lucas' vivid imagination, scientists have recently discovered a real-life planet located in a three-star system.
In a study featured in the Astronomical Journal, researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) have identified a giant gas planet known as KELT-4Ab, which belonged to a system that has three stars.
The first star, KELT-A, serves as the sun for KELT-4Ab, while the other two, KELT-B and KELT-C, are located farther from the Jupiter-like planet and tend to just orbit one another. Scientists calculate that it takes approximately 4,000 years for KELT-B and KELT-C to complete their orbit of KELT-A.
The discovery of KELT-4Ab and its stars provides a great opportunity to study such formations in space. It is only the fourth such triple-star system ever to be found as well as the closest one to our own galaxy.
The CfA researchers believe that from the perspective of a person who is on KELT-4Ab, the star KELT-A would look like forty times as big as our own sun appears to us when viewing it from the Earth. This is because of KELT-A's close proximity to the massive gas planet.
Meanwhile, light from the stars KELT-B and KELT-C would appear only as bright as that of our moon because of how far the two are from KELT-4Ab.
Despite having been aware of KELT system's existence for years, astronomers initially thought that its two stars were merely just a single star.
The CfA researchers were able to confirm that the system does indeed contain two stars after observing them using a robotic telescope known as the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT). Two of these types of telescopes were used, with one of the set up in Arizona in the United States and the other one was set up in South Africa. The KELT system was named after this robotic telescope.
Scientists plan to observe the triple-star system in order to have a better understanding of how giant gas planets, such as KELT-4Ab, are able to withstand being very close to their host star.
