New exoplanet with four stars found

Washington, March 5, 2015: Researchers using Adaptive Optics System developed by Indian scientists at Pune-based Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics have discovered a new exoplanet with four stars. The four-star planetary system, called 30 Ari, is located 136 light-years away in the constellation Aries. This is only the second time that a planet has been identified in a quadruple star system. The first four-star planet, KIC 4862625, was discovered in 2013 by citizen scientists using public data from NASA's Kepler mission. Earlier, the planet that is 10 times the mass of Jupiter was thought to have only three stars, not four. "About four percent of solar-type stars are in quadruple systems, which is up from previous estimates because observational techniques are steadily improving," said Andrei Tokovinin of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile and co-author. The gaseous planet orbits its primary star every 335 days.