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WRITER FUEL: A World With Three Suns

world with three suns - deposit photos

Welcome to the latest installment of “Writer Fuel – cool real-world stories that might inspire your little writer heart. Check out our Writer Fuel page on the LimFic blog for more inspiration. Today: 

There’s now even more evidence that a bizarre star system perched on the constellation Orion’s nose may contain the rarest type of planet in the known universe: a single world orbiting three suns simultaneously.

The star system, known as GW Orionis (or GW Ori) and located about 1,300 light-years from Earth, makes a tempting target for study; with three dusty, orange rings nested inside one another, the system literally looks like a giant bull’s-eye in the sky. At the center of that bull’s-eye live three stars — two locked in a tight binary orbit with each other, and a third swirling widely around the other two.

Triple-star systems are rare in the cosmos, but GW Ori gets even weirder the closer astronomers look. In a 2020 paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers took a close look at GW Ori with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile, and discovered that the system’s three dust rings are actually misaligned with one another, with the innermost ring wobbling wildly in its orbit.

Full Story From Live Science

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