Welcome to the latest installment of “Writer Fuel – cool real-world stories that might inspire your little writer heart. Check out our Writer Fuel page on the LimFic blog for more inspiration. Today:
There’s now even more evidence that a bizarre star system perched on the constellation Orion’s nose may contain the rarest type of planet in the known universe: a single world orbiting three suns simultaneously.
The star system, known as GW Orionis (or GW Ori) and located about 1,300 light-years from Earth, makes a tempting target for study; with three dusty, orange rings nested inside one another, the system literally looks like a giant bull’s-eye in the sky. At the center of that bull’s-eye live three stars — two locked in a tight binary orbit with each other, and a third swirling widely around the other two.
Triple-star systems are rare in the cosmos, but GW Ori gets even weirder the closer astronomers look. In a 2020 paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers took a close look at GW Ori with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile, and discovered that the system’s three dust rings are actually misaligned with one another, with the innermost ring wobbling wildly in its orbit.
