Yesterday night, researchers meeting in Reno, Nevada, at the annual meeting of the Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society presented their discovery of a four-sun planet. A circumbinary planet is one that orbits two suns. Only six other circumbinary planets are known to exist. "Citizen scientists" Robert Gagliano and Kian Jek combed through data from NASA's $600 million Kepler telescope and coordinated their findings with Yale astronomers to find the first known quadruple-sun system. This rare planet is a little bigger than Neptune, with a radius about six times greater than Earth. It is now known as PH1 (short for Planet Hunters 1), taking its name from the online citizen science project behind its discovery.
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