Circumtriple planet

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A circumtriple planet (or circum-ternary planet[1]) is a planet that is orbiting not only a single star but three stars at the same time.[2] Such planets are likely to be very rare objects in the universe.[3]

Studying them could add to human understanding of how planets form.[4]

Examples

Gliese 900 (the brightest star) and its planet (circled) as seen by the WISE telescope.

The only confirmed circumtriple planet, as of 2024, is Gliese 900 b (CWISE J233531.55+014219.6). It was found to be gravitationally bound to the Gliese 900 system in 2024, at a projected separation of 12,000 au,[5] thus becoming the planet with the longest orbital period.

Candidates

Schematic diagram showing a proposed geometry of the GW Orionis star system. Scientists have observed abnormalities in the behavior patterns of the three stars and have speculated that an unseen planet may be orbiting all three stars simultaneously.

As of 2021, it is suspected that the star system GW Orionis, which contains a large disk of dust and gases and is about 1,300 light years away from Earth, has a circumtriple planet within an gap observed in the dust cloud.[6] The planet itself has not been seen but its influence may explain gravitational oddities within the star system.[4] By using computer modeling, some scientists believe that a Jupiter-sized planet may be able to explain the star system's rings and strange behavior, according to one account.[3] If confirmed, this may be the first known example of a circumtriple planet.[3]

In 2022, tentative evidence of a very small planet was found around the triple system PSR J0337+1715.[7] In 2024, additional data allowed the planet's mass to be constrained to 0.0041±0.003 M🜨, making it one of the smallest objects directly detected outside the Solar System so far.[1] However, in 2025 it was suggested that the planet is not real, but instead an artifact of "red noise", which is a product of variability within the pulsar in the system.[8]

Fiction

References

Further reading

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