With the help of the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have detected a planet that is orbiting two dwarf stars.

According to a recent NASA news release, the and the planet orbits them about 300 million miles awayin the system OGLE-2007-BLG-349, located 8,000 light-years away towards the center of our galaxy.

According to NASA, a full orbit around the pair is estimated to take about seven years to complete.

The system was first spotted in 2007 by an international team of astronomers, but ground-based observations uncovered a star and a planet. A detailed analysis also revealed a third body that astronomers could not definitively identify at the time.

This artist's illustration shows a gas giant planet circling a pair of red dwarf stars in the system OGLE-2007-BLG-349, located 8,000 light-years away. The Saturn-mass planet orbits roughly 300 million miles from the stellar duo. The two red dwarf stars are 7 million miles apart.

(NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI))

At a Glance

Astronomers have identified a distant planet that orbits two stars.The three-body system was identified with the help of the Hubble telescope.

"The ground-based observations suggested two possible scenarios for the three-body system: a Saturn-mass planet orbiting a close binary star pair or a Saturn-mass and an Earth-mass planet orbiting a single star," said David Bennett of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the paper's first author.

The team decided to use the Hubble Space Telescope to get a better view. The high-resolution images revealed that the third unidentified body was that of a second dwarf star.

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Bennett's team conducted the follow-up observations with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2.

"We were helped in the analysis by the almost perfect alignment of the foreground binary stars with the background star, which greatly magnified the light and allowed us to see the signal of the two stars," Bennett explained.

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