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Astronomers discover rocky planet with 3 glowing suns

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Astronomers discover rocky planet with 3 glowing suns

A group of astronomers have discovered an exoplanet orbiting a mutual centre of gravity with a triple-star system.

The newly discovered planet has a rather catchy name, LTT 1445Ab, as it orbits the primary star of three red dwarfs that constitute the system LTT 1445, located around 22.5 light-years away.

“If you’re standing on the surface of that planet, there are three suns in the sky, but two of them are pretty far away and small-looking,” astronomer Jennifer Winters of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics told New Scientist.

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“They’re like two red, ominous eyes in the sky.”
Her team’s research has been submitted to The Astronomical Journal, and it is expected to be peer-reviewed by other astronomers very soon.

The planet was discovered by TESS, NASA’s planet-hunting space telescope designed to find exoplanets that pass between earth and their home star, by detecting the telltale dimming as the planet blocks a small percentage of the star’s light.

Reports say the new planet only clocks in at about 1.35 times the physical size of Earth. Into that size, it packs up to 8.4 times Earth’s mass, so it’s a lot denser than our home planet.

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