Technology in development could capture
The new technique, presented Dec. 15 at the American Geophysical Union's annual meeting in New Orleans, could also help researchers see exoplanets in other systems with more than one star.
Although there's only one star in Earth's solar system, previous work found that two-thirds of so-called class G yellow dwarf stars (the group that includes our sun) are in multiple systems, or systems with two or more stars orbiting each other. Some known multiple systems are home to up to seven stars. [What Do We Know About Alpha Centauri?] Because multiple systems are common, they may be rich targets in the hunt for alien planets, according to Ruslan Belikov, an astrophysicist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, and his colleagues. For example, the sun's closest neighbor, the Alpha Centauri system, possesses three stars and potentially multiple planets, such as the Earth-size Proxima Centauri b.
