This month, two San Diego State astronomy professors were part of the discovery of a unique, new planet. The planet, labeled PH1, is a gas giant approximately six times larger than Earth. It also orbits a pair of twin suns, making it one of the few recorded circumbinary planets. What makes PH1 particularly interesting is that it’s orbited by a second pair of stars, making it the first planet discovered in a four- star system.
The Yale-led program Planet Hunters conducted the research, and PH1 is its first confirmed planetary discovery. The program calls upon the public to assess data gathered from NASA’s Kepler telescope to search for evidence of new planetary and solar systems.
SDSU astronomy professors William Welsh and Jerome Orosz were among many researchers called upon by the program to further analyze the gathered data by the Kepler Space telescope team. Their research, along with the research of many amateur astronomers, led to the discovery of PH1.
“It’s a brand new type of star system. A year ago, they were only science fiction,” Welsh said. “It wasn’t even clear you could form planets in such a complicated system. And now we know that you can. That means there are lots of places you can have planets.”
The discovery of PH1 is not the first time Welsh and Orosz have encountered a planet revolving around more than one star. In late August, Orosz released his discovery of the Kepler-47 system, which contained two planets orbiting twin stars.
“This type of planet that orbits two stars has been a great new discovery. Our No. 1 goal right now is to just find more and then once we find more, we start to see more interesting trends,” Welsh said.
This “…(tells) us more on how planets form, and maybe the environment around the stars that helps make these planets.”
The success of the Planet Hunters program brings in a new age of scientific discovery, one where citizen scientists are able to utilize NASA data to shed more light on the unknown universe.
“The real significance of the discovery is that amateurs did it, and that nature likes to make planets,” Welsh said.
As the great astronomer Carl Sagan once said, “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” We can only wait to see what fascinating new discoveries SDSU has yet to uncover.
