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SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY 1: Scientists Discover Atypical Planet

Discovering a planet may be commonplace in the scientific community, but the most recently found planet is different from the usual: it has three suns.

The newfound solar system threw a wrench in a number of theories about how planets are formed. Each of these suns--or large stars--has a gravitational pull, and until this discovery, scientists believed that planets could not survive within the complicated play of gravity between multiple stars.

The newly discovered planet is slightly larger than Jupiter. This planet orbits a star that resembles our sun. In turn, that star has two smaller stars within its gravitational field. The sun-like star glows yellow and is the largest of the three. One of the smaller ones glows red, and the other glows orange. These two stars orbit each other, and their orbital distance is comparable to the distance between our sun and the planet Saturn.

Many planets in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, exist within binary star systems; meaning they orbit two large stars. Yet in these cases, one of the stars is so far away that it does not influence the formation of the planet.

This tertiary star system is about 149 light-years away from Earth. A light-year is a measure of distance, not of time, so in Earth terms, it would take 149 years to reach this planetary system.

--Written by Amelise Javier

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SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY 2: Shared Gene Map