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“‘Star Wars’ missed number one,” said Rebecca Nealon of the University of Warwick in England, one of the paper’s authors.
Scientists searched for a planet orbiting three stars and found potential evidence in another system. GG Tau A, located about 450 light-years from Earth. But the researchers say the gap in GW Ori’s ring of gas and dust makes it a more convincing example.
“This could be the first evidence of a circular planet forming a vacuum in real time,” said Jeremy Smallwood of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, lead author of the new paper.
William Welsh, an astronomer at San Diego State University, said the researchers “is a good case. It would be fascinating if it turned out to be a planet.”
Alison Young from the University of Leicester in England, who argues that the space in the disk of the system is caused by the stars of GW Ori rather than a planet, states that observations to be made from the ALMA telescope and Very Large Telescope in Chile in the coming months may end the discussion. .
Dr. “We will be able to look for direct evidence of a planet on the disk,” Young said.
If the planetary hypothesis is confirmed, the system will reinforce the idea that planet formation is common. Several worlds, known as peripheral planets, are already known to orbit two stars at the same time. But circular planets were harder to find – despite predictions at least one tenth the number of all star clusters in three or more systems. Yet their probable existence suggests that planets appear in all kinds of places, even in these strangest systems.
Dr. “Three stars is not enough to kill planet formation,” Nealon said.
This suggests that exoplanets are more likely to appear in more and more unusual places. “What we’ve learned is that planets can form at any time,” said Sean Raymond, an astronomer at the University of Bordeaux in France, who was not featured in the paper.
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