Researchers Who Studied a Triple-Star System Retracted Their Paper

An international team of researchers has retracted a paper published in 2016 in the Science journal. It focused on the discovery of an exoplanet in the HD 131399 triple-star system.

When observing the HD 131399 system that consisted of three stars, the researchers noticed another object presumably orbiting one of the three stars. It was described as an exoplanet four times the size of Jupiter.

The discovery attracted the attention of the scientific community. However, during subsequent observations, another team of researchers questioned their colleagues' conclusions. A more detailed analysis showed that the exoplanet was most likely not part of HD 131399 but a much more distant background object.

This finding led the original team of researchers to take another look at their previous work, and then observe HD 131399 again over an extended period of time. As a result, they found a significant difference in the distance between HD 131399 and the object thought to be an exoplanet. This confirmed that it was a background object, most likely a distant star.