{{This week, reality trumped (science) fiction with an image even more enthralling: two amateur astronomers poring through data from deep, distant skies and discovering a planet with four suns.}}<\/p>\n
NASA’s website calls the phenomenon a circumbinary planet, or a planet that orbits two suns.<\/p>\n
Rare enough on its own — only six other circumbinary planets are known to exist — this planet is orbited by two more distant stars, making it the first known quadruple sun system.<\/p>\n
Researchers presented the finding Monday night at the annual meeting of the Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society in Reno, Nevada.<\/p>\n
The discovery of the four-sun planet by amateur scientists takes crowd sourcing to new heights. <\/p>\n
The expression, coined by Wired magazine editor Jeff Howe, describes tasks that are outsourced to a disparate group of people to come up with a solution.<\/p>\n
In this case, the Planet Hunters group made data from NASA’s $600 million Kepler telescope available to the public through its website and coordinates their findings with Yale astronomers.<\/p>\n
In combing through the data, “Citizen scientists” Robert Gagliano and Kian Jek spied anomalies that confirmed the existence of the special planet, now known as PH1 — short for Planet Hunters 1 — the first heavenly body found by the online citizen science project.<\/p>\n
The planet is a little bigger than Neptune, with a radius about six times greater than Earth.<\/p>\n
“I celebrate this discovery for the wow-factor of a planet in a four-star system,” said Natalie Batalha, a Kepler scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California.<\/p>\n
“Most importantly, I celebrate this discovery as the fruit of exemplary human cooperation — cooperation between scientists and citizens who give of themselves for the love of stars, knowledge, and exploration.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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