The sun also rises, and rises, and rises: strange solar system contains one planet and three stars

An international team of astronomers announced Thursday the discovery of a strange planet in a faraway solar system that contains not one sun, but three of them.

This distant world appears even more unusual than the home planet of Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars saga, Tatooine, which orbited around two suns, according to the findings published in the US journal Science.

Such binary solar systems may be relatively common in the universe, but experts say those involving three stars or more are rare.

“Imagine this: a planet where you’d either experience constant daylight or enjoy triple sunrises and sunsets each day, depending on the seasons, which happen to last longer than human lifetimes,” said a statement from the University of Arizona, which led the astronomy team.

The planet has been named HD 131399Ab, and it is located about 340 light years from Earth in the constellation Centaurus.

The cosmic body is believed to be relatively young, about 16 million years old, which makes it one of the youngest planets discovered outside our solar system to date.

Its mass is believed to be four times that of the gas giant Jupiter, which is our solar system’s largest planet.