"CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - In a scenario out of "Star Wars," astronomers have detected a planet outside our solar system with not one, but three suns, a finding that challenges astronomers' theories of planetary formation.
The planet, a gas giant slightly larger than Jupiter, orbits the main star of a triple-star system known as HD 188753 in the constellation Cygnus ("The Swan"). The stellar trio and its planet are about 149 light-years from Earth and about as close to each other as our sun is to Saturn, U.S. scientists reported on Thursday in the current edition of the journal Nature. A light-year is about 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year.
If you stood on the planet's surface, you would see three suns in sky, although its orbit centers around the main yellow star among the trio. The larger of the other two suns would be orange and the smaller would be red, astronomers at California Institute of Technology said in a statement..."
Now this is an awesome thing to find and I'd love to see it with my own eyes... but I pose to you, the intelligent reader, how in all creation would a person stand on the surface of a gas giant planet? Last time I checked, they aren't exactly the most stable sort of place to be hanging out on, what with all that super-heated poisonous gas floating about... plus if I weighed 136 lbs on Earth, I'd weigh around 344.4 lbs on a Jupiter-like planet... I'd be too busy suffering from death or moving my gravity-fattened behind to get out of the fury of a gas storm to admire the pretty colours of the triad of suns!
~O~ ~o~ ~O~
Oh and on a slightly less silly note, I'd like to thank my good friend for the honour of collecting her mail and accidently killing one of her plants while she was in the UK only blocks away from one of the recent terrorist attacks there... I got a sew-on badge/patch with the adorable Welsh dragon on it and might perhaps get a Roman coin out of the deal... and since I didn't really expect to get much more than a postcard and a story about what happened while she was away anyhow, there is much happiness in myself today... I'm just uber-glad that she and her man made it back safely! ^_^
