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Astronomers have discovered a very rare group of five connected stars amid skies that would "put the makers of Star Wars to shame."

The remarkable find will be unveiled today at a major conference in Llandudno.

The unusual star system - the first of its kind to be found - was detected by the SuperWASP (Wide Angle Search for Planets) project.

Scientists working on the project use cameras based in the Canary Islands and South Africa to track almost the whole of the sky every few minutes.

Over many years the cameras have recorded the brightness of individual stars and plotted their movements into light curves.

Dr Marcus Lohr, of the Open University, who is at the National Astronomy Meeting at Venue Cymru today, described the newly found star system as “exotic”.

"No fewer than five suns"

He said: “In principle there’s no reason it (the star system) couldn’t have planets in orbit around each of the pairs of stars.

“Any inhabitants of the planets would have a sky that would put the makers of Star Wars to shame.

“There could sometimes be no fewer than five suns of different brightnesses lighting up the landscape.

“Days would have dramatically varying light levels as the different stars were eclipsed.

“They would, though miss out on night for a large part of their ‘year’, only experiencing darkness (and a night sky) when the stars were on the same side of their world.”

According to Dr Lohr one particularly interesting aspect of the discovery was two binaries (pairs) appear to be orbiting on the same plane.

This suggest all of the stars may have originally formed from a single disk of gas and dust, which broke up as gravity concentrated it into clumps.

Dr Lohr said: “Studying this bizarre system will help astronomers to better understand how stars and planets, including our own, came into being.”

The two sets of stars are separated by about 21 billion km, rather larger than the size of Pluto’s orbit around the Sun.

Open University researchers say the stars are about 250 million light years away from Earth in the constellation of Ursa Major.

An artist’s impression of the five star system (pictured) shows smaller orbits and a larger orbit, although not to scale.

Inset images are to scale, along with an image of the Sun for comparison.

The blue dotted line marks the orbital path of the two pairs of stars.

Meanwhile the fifth star, whose position is uncertain, is to the right of the left pair.