Astronomers have discovered a massive planet with four suns only 125 light-years from Earth. The planet is at least 10 times as big as Jupiter and probably has no actual surface to stand on. If you could fly a spacecraft into its atmosphere and look up, you would see one primary sun, a bright red dot and another star shining more brightly than Venus does in our night sky. If you look through a telescope, the smallest white star would be revealed to be a binary system of two stars.  

"It would depend on what kind of sky you had, but chances are that at least one of them would be up at any given time," said Lewis Roberts, an astronomer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who helped discover the rare quadruple system. With a Robo-AO adaptive optics system, "You can almost get to the quality of what you would get from a telescope in space," Roberts said. "So now we can pick out faint stars that couldn't be seen before." "There are other known quadruple systems -- there are even known quintuple systems," he said. "As we find more and more exo-planets, we'll probably find some of them in systems like these."

By Premji