Planet Lit by Four Suns Spotted by Volunteers

Residing 5,000 light-years away, scientists say that the "gas giant" planet PH1 captures the light from four suns.

As BBC News writes, "the distant world orbits one pair of stars and has a second stellar pair revolving around it."

However, the discovery itself was made by users of the site Planethunters.org, which grants volunteers access to NASA's Kepler Space Telescope.

The University of Oxford's Dr. Chris Lintott explains that "all four stars pulling on it creates a very complicated environment. Yet there it sits in an apparently stable orbit."

He adds, "that's really confusing, which is one of the things which makes this discovery so fun. It's absolutely not what we would have expected."

The unpredictable behavior of the stars may have larger echoes in our scientific understanding of planets throughout the universe. "The planets are forming close in and are able to cling to a stable orbit there. That probably has implications for how planets form elsewhere," says Lintott.

So, how does this change our understanding of planetary movement? The Oxford professor notes, "I think what this is telling us is planets can form in the inner parts of protoplanetary discs."

Protoplanetary disks are comprised of dense gas that circle newly birthed stars.

Lintott argues that such a discovery would not have been possible without human pattern recognition. "Computerized attempts to find things missed this system entirely. That tells you there are probably more of these that are slipping through our fingers. We've just stuck a load of new data up on Planethunters.org to help people find the next one."