Planet with three suns ‘like ominous red eyes’ is spotted by NASA telescope
In Star Wars, the planet Tattooine is orbited by two suns - but scientists just spotted a planet which goes one better.
It’s orbited by three suns at once (although they’re red dwarf stars, so they don’t blaze quite as brightly as ours).
Researchers spotted the unusual planet 22.5 light years from Earth, in the middle of a triple-star system with three red dwarf stars.
The planet LTT 1445Ab orbits one star, but two others are visible from the surface, the astronomers told New Scientist.
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Jennifer Winters, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said, ‘If you're standing on the surface of that planet, there are three suns in the sky, but two of them are pretty far away and small-looking.
‘They're like two red, ominous eyes in the sky.’
Red dwarf stars are smaller and cooler than our sun, and are often not visible to the naked eye.
Red dwarf stars are common in our Milky Way, accounting for 80 per cent of the 200 to 400 billion stars in our galaxy.
