In The Light of 4 Suns

Astronomers have spotted a dusty disk in a four-star solar system that could be home to a planet in the making.

Using the infrared eyes of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers spotted the swirling disk around a pair of stars in the quadruple-star system HD 98800, located 150 light-years away in the constellation TW Hydrae. oOo

If a planet did form in the disk, its sky would be bathed in the light of four suns.

One pair of suns would blaze brightly, while the other pair, gravitationally bound to the first pair, would appear as little more than faint pinpoints of light. oOo Joining in the Cosmic Dance of Creation. Praise to the Lord in the sun, moon and stars! oOo

The finding will be detailed in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

oOo Quadruple sunsets oOo

The researchers spied two separate belts of material in the circumstellar disk. One belt sits at 1.5 to 2 astronomical units (AU) from the binary stars and likely consists of fine dust grains. The other is located about 5.9 AU away from and is probably made up of asteroids or comets. (One AU is equal to the distance between the Earth and the sun.)

A swath of near-empty space separates the two belts, inside of which a budding planet might roam. oOo "Oh give me a home, where the planets all roam. . . " oOo oOo

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