Real planet with three suns is way weirder than Tatooine or Westeros - CNET

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Luke Skywalker's home planet in "Star Wars" has two suns and wherever Westeros from "Game of Thrones" is, it suffers from long and weirdly unpredictable winters, but a real exoplanet over 300 light years away may be even more strange. Astronomers have found the first planet orbiting three suns, giving it quite a lot of sunrises, sunsets and daylight depending on the seasons, which last for centuries.

The gas giant HD 131399Ab is located 340 light years from here in the constellation Centaurus, where it is part of an odd three-star system. The planet orbits closely to the brightest of the three stars, while the other two stars whirl about each other in a hyperactive dance as the pair orbits the brightest star.

If you were standing on the planet, which would be difficult because it's very hot and mostly gas, your daily interaction with your three stars would be pretty different from what we're used to from our plain old single sun.

"For about half of the planet's orbit, which lasts 550 Earth-years, three stars are visible in the sky, the fainter two always much closer together, and changing in apparent separation from the brightest star throughout the year," said Kevin Wagner, a member of the research team that discovered the planet, in a release. "For much of the planet's year the stars appear close together, giving it a familiar night-side and day-side with a unique triple-sunset and sunrise each day. As the planet orbits and the stars grow further apart each day, they reach a point where the setting of one coincides with the rising of the other - at which point the planet is in near-constant daytime for about one-quarter of its orbit, or roughly 140 Earth-years."

You can get a better idea of what the system looks like in the video below.