Today we're pleased to announce the discovery of the first confirmed planet discovered by Planet Hunters, and it's a fabulous and unusual world. Labelled 'Planet Hunters 1' (or PH1) in a paper released today and submitted to the Astrophysical Journal, it is the first planet in a four-star system. It is a circumbinary planet - one which orbits a double star - and our follow-up observations indicate that there is a second pair of stars approximately 90 billion miles (1000 Astronomical Units) away which are gravitationally bound to the system.
An incredible discovery and an ideal example of the importance and power of crowdsourcing!
