• The artist's animation shows the view from a hypothetical moon in orbit around the first known planet, HD 188753 Ab, to reside in a classic triple-star system.

The artist's animation shows the view from a hypothetical moon in orbit around the first known planet, HD 188753 Ab, to reside in a classic triple-star system. (Photo : NASA/JPL-Caltech)

An unusual alien planet has been discovered by a group of a scientist using a small two robotic telescope called Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT), located in Southern Arizona and South Africa respectively.


A new research published in the Astronomical Journal has revealed that the newly found distant planet in the Solar System orbits a single star. That single star, in turn, is orbited by a nearby pair of stars. The twin stars are close enough to the planet to appear about as extremely bright as the full moon in the sky.

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The alien planet, known as KELT-4Ab, is about as massive as Jupiter, the fifth planet from the Sun and the biggest in the Solar System. KELT-4Ab orbits the single star named KELT-A once every three days, while nearby stars, KELT-B, and KELT-C, orbit each other once every 30 years.

"Those two stars would orbit each other every about 30 years, and every 4,000 years they'd make one orbit around KELT-4A," Space.com quoted Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics' Research Associate Jason Eastman as saying.

The study aims to identify the system that incorporates the single star KELT-A, the more distant pairing KELT-B, C and the overheated planet called KELT-1b.

The overheated KELT-1b also known as "Hot Jupiter," is a type of alien planet, where their orbit is extremely close to their parent stars. The alien planet, which is mostly metallic hydrogen, has a massive world that is both hot and dense. It is said to be marginally bigger than Jupiter, yet contains 27 times of mass.

While the composition of the planet's atmosphere is not yet known, Eastman revealed that the single star would appear to be about 40 times as substantial as the sun that shows up in the sky on Earth. 

The alien planet, KELT-4Ab, is one of the known systems to contain a rare three stars. Other discovered uncommon world includes HD 188753 Ab, the first known extrasolar to reside in a classic triple-star system. It is approximately 151 light-years away in the constellation of Cygnus, the Swan.

Star KELT-A, on the other hand, is said to be the brightest host star, as it is the more blazing and nearer star that lies to Earth - only 680 light-years away. Check out the video below for more information: