For thousands of years the greatest minds of the time believed that the sun
revolved around earth when it's actually the other way around
and now we are discovering other planets that revolve around not one not two but three
three large magnificent stars all at once welcome to Factnomenal and today we'll be
talking about an exciting discovery of the first known planet to orbit three stars at the same time
finding the center ever since the dawn of man we've been searching for answers in the
immensity of the skies there are cave paintings dating 30,000 years that depict many of the
constellations we are familiar with to this day we have found patterns in the stars we created epic
and harrowing mythologies based on those patterns that resonate to the core of what makes us human
this was our first attempt to make sense of the grand mysteries that stood above us
and though we have come far from those early days inside those caves there are still a plethora
of mysteries to be uncovered even the greatest thinkers in ancient Greece were able to create
a somewhat accurate model that predicted the retrograde of the sun moon and other planets
with enough accuracy to put everyone at ease this model of the cosmos lasted for thousands of years
it wasn't until 1543 in Europe where this model was seriously challenged by the brilliant mind of
Nicolas Copernicus in his then controversial publication titled on the revolutions of the
heavenly spheres he posed the idea that the earth was not at the center of everything
it was the sun of course his paper was dismissed by many during this time mainly because his model
was just as accurate as the geocentric model that everyone had used for hundreds of years
but also because there was pushback and pressure from the catholic church to keep
these new findings in the dark it wasn't until 1609 that johannes kepler discovered
that the orbits of the planets revolving around the sun are not perfectly circular
he came across this discovery after trying to make sense of the movement of mars in the skies
kepler realized that the planets traveled in stretched out circles known as ellipses
the sun didn't sit exactly at the center of their orbit but instead lay off to the sides
with this major breakthrough we were able to create a detailed and accurate description
of the trajectory of the planets where the sun was finally placed at the center as we
all know it to this day and though that model has served us to find thousands of exoplanets
across various galaxies we were unprepared for what was to come in the next few centuries
the discovery of the first twin stars though once we believe that binary star systems were
extremely rare thanks to recent observations by our numerous telescopes around the globe we have
concluded that this is not the case at all in fact according to nasa it is estimated that throughout
the entire universe a whopping 40 to 60 percent of stars out there reside in multi-star systems
there are those who claim it could be up to 85 percent due to the fact that many believe
that when star systems are born at first they may have two or more small suns orbiting one another
but over millions of years some eventually crash with one another and make a single massive sun
these star systems would be expected to have a unique type of orbit called circum and though
we have been aware of the existence of planets orbiting multiple stars we had detected a few all
the way back in the mid 1990s but it wasn't until recently in January 2020 that we were officially
able to witness the first exoplanet in a binary star system officially known as TOI 1338b this
planet is located approximately 1300 light years away from earth in the constellation of Pector
it was observed by TESS the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite
the transiting exoplanet survey satellite is a space telescope for nasa's explorers program
designed to search for exoplanets using the transit method in an area 400 times larger
than that covered by the Kepler telescope the transit method of detecting exoplanets looks for
dips in the visible light of stars and requires that planets cross in front of stars along our
line of sight to them repetitive periodic dibs can reveal a planet or planets orbiting a star
at one point a star system like this was thought of only as science fiction perhaps most famously
depicted in George Lucas's star wars in 1977 if you were to stand on the surface of TOI 1338b
you would see something very similar depicted in the film though that would be an amazing sight to
behold it is unlikely that anyone could survive on the harsh surface of this exoplanet TOI 1338b
is about 6.9 times the size of earth it also has 33 times the mass of our own planet and it orbits
both of its stars every 95.2 days speaking of its stars one of them is very comparable to our sun
the other is just the tiny red dwarf roughly one-third the size of our sun those two stars
orbit one another every 14.6 days out of roughly two dozen currently known circum-binary planets 12
were discovered by nasa's Kepler space telescope a satellite that was ultimately responsible for
finding more than 2 300 exoplanets however a disadvantage of kepler's otherworldly catalog
is that many of the exoplanets it found are too distant for astronomers to study in detail
something that the transiting exoplanet survey satellite has been able to solve
an overly complicated orbit if a Tatooine-like world sounds a little too crazy to believe
what if i told you that recently we may have found a planet that is orbiting not two but three stars
at the same time in 2017 a team led by Jung Ching b and Yanke Vander Merrell with the university
of Victoria in Canada use the Atacama large millimeter array or alma telescope in Chile to
get a closer look at GW Ori a suspected exoplanet located almost 1300 light years away from us in
the head of the constellation of Orion thanks to its ability to inspect electromagnetic radiation
at a submillimeter level we have been able to learn more details about this oddly behaving
stellar object though this star system is relatively young this could prove to be one
of the most incredible discoveries we have made in the last decade we know that the majority of stars
are composed of two or more stars but that doesn't mean that they all have exoplanets orbiting them
it is thought to be rare to have planets orbit multiple stars because their trajectories could
be so wild that it would be almost impossible for a planet to form under such chaotic circumstances
and what could be more chaotic than a planet orbiting three stars though we have found
plenty of exoplanets in solar systems with three stars in the past perhaps most famously koi 5ab
these exoplanets though rare and fascinating only tend to orbit one of the stars in a multi-solar
system while GW Ori orbits all three of its stars GW Ori is one of the most oddly shaped
interstellar arrangements that astronomers have witnessed two stars are orbiting one another
while a third star zooms around the pair at a distance of hundreds of millions of miles away
a massive protoplanetary disk surrounds this triple star system this disc is a dense region
of gas and dust that's left over from the formation of these young stars and has not
yet been blown away by their stellar winds the reason scientists call it a protoplanetary disk
is because the remains of this material could someday form a planet not only that but this
disc is absolutely massive it has three rings each with a different angle the outermost ring
is about 400 astronomical units which is roughly around 10 times the distance from Pluto to our sun
the researchers used computer models to simulate this unique stellar system they also considered
the idea that the gap could be a byproduct of the torque of the three stars pulling on each other
the other option was that it could be a planet or planets massive enough to carve out the space
in the ring of dust after running several different simulations it was concluded that
the torque formed from the three stars was not enough to cause the break in the disc
the scientists then concluded that the gap is more likely due to undetected planets it may be only
a matter of months before we get confirmation of the existence of the first exoplanet in a
circumtriple orbit if this is confirmed and there is in fact an exoplanet in the GW Ori
system it could throw into question our previous assumptions of the rarity of this type of system
and perhaps there could be trillions of more exoplanets than we thought possible
thank you all for watching i hope you have learned something new
if you did be sure to subscribe to the channel for more amazing content like this
do you think GW Ori's discovery will help us identify more planets like this
tell us what you think in the comments down below if you're feeling generous you can buy us a coffee
with a link in the description this will help us towards our goal of bringing you better and
longer videos every single day of the week and as always thanks for watching we'll see you next time