An extrasolar planet in an exotic triple-star system lives in surprising harmony with the three suns hanging in its sky.

Credit: ESO/L. Calçada/M. Kornmesser

Kevin Wagner of the University of Arizona in Tucson and his colleagues used the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile to study the star system HD 131399, which lies about 98 parsecs from Earth in the constellation Centaurus.

Few exoplanets have been imaged directly, but the scientists took a series of pictures of a gas-giant planet roughly four times the mass of Jupiter, orbiting the brightest of the three stars. Simulations suggest that it is in a wide, stable orbit, rather than being in the process of being tossed out of the system by gravitational interactions between the stars.

Science http://doi.org/bk47 (2016)