This is scientific Americans 60 second science.

I'm Lee Billings.

Got a minute?

In his 1941 short story, Nightfall,

Isaac Asimov describes a planet called the gosh that resides in a multi-star system.

Constantly illuminated from all sides by its

countum, six suns.

Lagosh experiences dark skies for just a few hours once every 2,000 years. In the story, the rare celestial alignment occurs

and darkness descends for the first time in living memory, at which point the inhabitants of

Lagash go berserk and burn their cities.

Nightfall was sci-fi, but we now know the kinds of multi-star planetary systems it describes are real,

and more common than once thought.

For example, astronomers recently realize that a planet-hosting star

system has four sons, the second of its kind ever found. The finding is in the astronomical

journal. Our galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars and astronomers suspect planets

accompany almost all of them. This latest work implies that about 4% of Sun-like

stars may exist in quadruple systems. That's a lot of potential Lagoshes.

The system just found, called 30-ari, is 136 light years from Earth in the constellation Aries.

We had known of three stars there, as well as a planet

ten times bigger than Jupiter. The fourth star is the new discovery. The system

is arranged as two binary pairs that orbit each other at a distance more than a thousand times that between the Earth and our Sun.

The known planet orbits one star in one pair.

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