Triple-star Exoplanet Confirmed

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Text, News From The Universe. February 3, 2021. The Earth Spins.
 
Text, Triple Star Exoplanet Confirmed. February 3, 2021. Illustration credit Caltech slash R. Hurt, IPAC.
 
An unusual exoplanet in a triple-star system has been confirmed more than a decade after its first detection.
 
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Unlike our solar system with one star, the Sun, many other systems have multiple stars.
 
Many observatories, on the ground and in space, together confirmed exoplanet K O I dash 5 A b, first detected by NASA's Kepler mission in 2009.

The planet's unusual orbit is not aligned with the horizontal plane of the stars.
 
Diagram of the orbital paths within the K O I dash 5 system.
 
Text, The planet's orbit raises questions about how the stars and planet formed from the same dusty gas cloud.
 
Astronomers say the case of K O I dash 5 A b shows how important mission collaboration is to understanding the physics of multiple-star systems.
 
This news was brought to you in part by the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, CA.