Astronomers have discovered a planet with four suns residing in a four-star planetary system, called 30 Ari which is located almost 140 light-years away from our own solar system in the Aries constellation.

The quadruple star system 30 Ari had been discovered several years ago, but astronomers had until recently believed it to be composed of one planet and three stars. The new findings published in the Astronomical Journal in March, 2015 reveal that the astronomers identified the fourth star in the group after fitting a Robo-AO adaptive optics system to the telescopes at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego.

The planet is enormously gaseous with 10 times the mass of Jupiter and completes a single orbit of its primary star every 335 days. However, the planet does not orbit a relatively close partner star of the primary star, both of whom are locked in a long-distance orbit with another pair of stars located about 1,670 astronomical units away.

This marks the second time that astronomers have come across a planet residing in a quadruple star system after KIC 4862625 was discovered in 2013 by citizen journalists using public data obtained by NASA's Kepler mission.

Over the past few years, astronomers have discovered dozens of planets with two or three parent stars, which is not surprising as binary stars are more common in our galaxy than single stars. The latest discovery indicates that planets residing in quadruple star systems could be more common than previously believed. In fact, latest research has shown that such a star system consisting of two pairs of twin stars circling each other slowly at huge distances is not as rare as previously believed.

"About four percent of solar-type stars are in quadruple systems, which is up from previous estimates because observational techniques are steadily improving," said Andrei Tokovinin of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, who helped to discover 30 Ari. The latest discovery will help researchers gain an understanding of how planets are influenced by multiple star systems.