NASA's Kepler Mission Discovers a World Orbiting Two Stars!

[Anti]

Where the Sun Sets Twice

NASA's Kepler mission has discovered a world where two suns set over the horizon instead of just one. The planet, called Kepler-16b, is the most "Tatooine-like" planet yet found in our galaxy and is depicted here in this artist's concept with its two stars. Tatooine is the name of Luke Skywalker's home world in the science fiction movie Star Wars. In this case, the planet it not thought to be habitable. It is a cold world, with a gaseous surface, but like Tatooine, it circles two stars. The largest of the two stars, a K dwarf, is about 69 percent the mass of our sun, and the smallest, a red dwarf, is about 20 percent the sun's mass.

Most of what we know about the size of stars comes from pairs of stars that are oriented toward Earth in such a way that they are seen to eclipse each other. These star pairs are called eclipsing binaries. In addition, virtually all that we know about the size of planets around other stars comes from their transits across their stars. The Kepler-16 system combines the best of both worlds with planetary transits across an eclipsing binary system. This makes Kepler-16b one of the best-measured planets outside our solar system.

Kepler-16 orbits a slowly rotating K-dwarf that is, nevertheless, very active with numerous star spots. Its other parent star is a small red dwarf. The planetary orbital plane is aligned within half a degree of the stellar binary orbital plane. All these features combine to make Kepler-16 of major interest to studies of planet formation as well as astrophysics.

A longer, more detailed article can be found at
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/news/kepler-16b.html

 

[CANNATOPIA]

Very Cool.

 

[DiscoBiscuit]

Lol, I bet that black thing is a Kingsford briquette.

 

[Anti]

The link shows some video "artist's renderings" of the orbits of all three bodies. It's a gas giant (about the size of Saturn minus the rings) so it is a fair distance away from either of the two. The small red dwarf circles around the larger star and the planet is orbiting both of them with its "year" taking about 229 days. The larger one is only ~70% the mass of the sun, so you can imagine that a planet that is circling out in "gas giant" territory will be pretty cold.

 

[rick shaw]

...said to be Rez's home planet.

 

[DiscoBiscuit]

Hey, at least I didn't say it was Yahoo flying about.

 

[Stoner4Life]

What do the Starship Enterprise & Charmin toilet paper have in common?









They can both be found circling Uranus looking for Klingons.

 

[DiscoBiscuit]

Ever heard of John Wayne toilet paper? It's rough and tough and don't take shit off nobody.

 

[Space Toker]

yeah man! This is cool! And they found a super-Earth a couple days ago, and the total number of planets at http://www.exoplanet.eu/ has gone up dramatically these last few days! We are not far away from discovering exomoons and truly Earth-like planets! Exciting times we are living in!