Here in our Solar System, we've only got one star: the Sun. That gives us nice predictable daily and annual cycles; night and day, the seasons, that sort of thing. Astronomers have found a newly forming extrasolar planetary system that has 4 stars. The discovery, made using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, revealed a dusty disk surround a pair of stars in the quadruple-star system HD 98800.The system itself is pretty complicated, so bear with me as I try to explain it. There are two pairs of binary stars; 2 + 2 = 4 stars in total. These two binary groupings are separated by 50 astronomical units (AU); approximately the distance between the Sun and Pluto. Around one of these binary pairs, astronomers discovered two belts of material.The first belt sits at approximately 1.5 to 2 AU (twice the distance from the Sun to the Earth), and seems to consist of fine grains of dust. The second belts is further out at approximately 5.9 AU and is probably made up of asteroids or comets.
The sunsets would be spectacular.
The sunsets would be spectacular.
