Circumbinary planet

Typical configuration of circumbinary planetary systems (not to scale), in which A and B are the primary and secondary star, while ABb denotes the circumbinary planet
An artist's impression of the giant planet orbiting the binary system PSR B1620-26, which contains a pulsar and a white dwarf star and is located in the globular cluster M4

A circumbinary planet is a planet that orbits two stars instead of one. The two stars orbit each other in a binary system, while the planet orbits farther from the center of the system than either of the two stars. In contrast, circumstellar planets in a binary system have stable orbits around one of the two stars, closer in than the orbital distance of the other star (see Habitability of binary star systems). Studies in 2013 showed that there is a strong hint that a circumbinary planet and its stars originate from a single disk.

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