With news inputs by Aryaa Sinha
Toronto, Oct 5: Earth’s solar system consists of planets orbiting a single, central star, but this is more unusual than multi-star systems. Around half of all star systems feature two stars, called a “binary pair”, and around one in five star systems feature three or more stars. GW Orionis, or GW Ori, is a triple star system located at the head of Orion the Hunter. Astronomers from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, discovered a star system in GW Orion in which an exoplanet orbits 3 stars simultaneously.
GW Orionis is a star system in the Orion constellation, and it is 1300 light years away from the Earth. (1 light year =9.5 trillion km). In GW Ori, the first two stars are the same distance away from each other as the Earth is to the Sun, known as an Astronomical Unit (au). The third star is around eight AU away from the first two. For this, researchers used the powerful Atacama large millimeter / submillimeter array (ALMA) telescope, and found there was a large gap between the dust rings around these 3 stars.
There were 2 leading hypothesis about what could be creating this gap in the structure. Either, the gravitational influence of the star was breaking the disc apart, or a massive planet was forming and creating the gap. So, to study this further, a detailed model of GW Ori was created, and the result showed that torque from star shouldn’t be enough to break the disc. However, a large Jupiter sized planet could be possible. The research was published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.