Planet Orbiting Pair of Stars tagged posts

This artist’s illustration shows a gas giant planet circling a pair of red dwarf stars. The Saturn-mass planet orbits roughly 300 million miles from the stellar duo. The two red dwarf stars are a mere 7 million miles apart. Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)

Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, and a trick of nature, have confirmed the existence of a planet orbiting two stars in the system OGLE-2007-BLG-349, 8,000 light-years away towards the center of our galaxy. The planet orbits ~300 million miles from the stellar duo, about the distance from the asteroid belt to our sun. It completes an orbit around both stars roughly every 7 years. The 2 red dwarf stars are a mere 7 million miles apart, or 14 times the diameter of the moon’s orbit around Earth.

The Hubble observations...