There’s now even more evidence that a bizarre star system perched on the constellation Orion’s nose may contain the rarest type of planet in the known universe: a single world orbiting three suns simultaneously. The star system, known as GW Orionis (or GW Ori) and located about 1,300 light years from Earth, makes a tempting target for study. With three dusty, orange rings nested inside one another, the system looks like a giant bullseye in the sky. At the centre of that bullseye live three stars: two locked in a tight binary orbit with each other and a third swirling widely around the other two.
Triple-star systems are rare in the cosmos, but GW Ori gets even weirder the closer astronomers look. In 2020, researchers took a close look at GW Ori with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile and discovered that the system’s three dust rings are actually misaligned with one another, with the innermost ring wobbling wildly in its orbit.