Planets found to exist in trinary systems

Yesterday, my grandma told me that she heard on the news that some Polish guy discovered a new planet. It's hardly newsworthy topic, but it's always good news when one of our own accomplishes something important. I was wondering if this was yet another one of those planetoid things in Kupier's Belt that are almost the size of Pluto (which is hardly a planet anyway) but not really, or a brand new solar system found using the wobble method. So I asked "where"? Granny looked at me like I was retarded and said: "What do you mean where? In space, dummy!" :P

See, I should have known better by now, but I forget. Still, I find it funny. I'm wondering about Kupiers Belt planetoids, and/or finding planets by measuring the wobble in stars orbit - while my grandma thinks I'm an absent minded, duffs that was spacing out all this time and just woke up :P

Anyways, since she did not see the whole report I could not get much more info out of her. I figured that if it was significant, and new it will end up on slashdot eventually. And here it is today.

So the story here is that Maciej Kornacki (note the name - definitely Polish. I guess this is how he ended up on Polish news granny was watching) from Caltech has discovered a planet in a trinary star system. It is newsworthy, because it was previously speculated that planets usually form around single stars. So this is a proof that planets can form, or at least stay in orbit within a multiple star system.

Now I remember someone picking apart Pitch Black, claiming that trinary star systems were unstable and would never have planets. I guess he was wrong :P You know - I have to admit that I actually never really realized that scientists were thinking multi-star systems would not have planets. I remember playing Frontier back in the day, and binary and trinary systems with planets were soft of a common thing :P

Tags: science, space, planets, solar systems, trinary systems