> Double Sun Planets Sign Up for Free NewsLetter Email Address
Published August 29, 2012 02:04 PM
Double Sun Planets
Planets with a 4 Star SystemOctober 15, 2012 01:44 PM
Small Planet Around Kepler -37February 21, 2013 04:37 PM
Clouds observed on an Exo - Planet!October 19, 2013 07:41 AM
Finding PlanetsSeptember 29, 2011 12:49 PM
Our world orbits a single star. There are many more multiple stars systems than those that are single star systems. How hard would it be to have planets orbit a double star? Well that answer is not clear yet but astronomers have found planet orbiting a double star. Astronomers at the International Astronomical Union meeting announced the discovery of the first transiting circumbinary multi-planet system: two planets orbiting around a pair of stars. This discovery shows that planetary systems can form and survive even in the chaotic environment around a binary star. And such planets can exist in the habitable zone of their stars. ADVERTISEMENT If one hears the Star Wars them when reading this story, remember Tatooine, orbits not one, but two stars."Each planet transits over the primary star, giving unambiguous evidence that the planets are real," said Jerome Orosz, San Diego State University Associate Professor of Astronomy and lead author of the study which is published today in the journal Science.This system, known as Kepler-47, contains a pair of stars that whir around each other every 7.5 days. One star is similar to the Sun while the other is a diminutive star only one third the size and 175 times fainter. The inner planet is only 3x larger in diameter than the Earth, making it the smallest known transiting circumbinary planet. It orbits the stellar pair every 49 days.To add the oddness, the outer planet is slightly larger than Uranus and orbits every 303 days, making it the longest-period transiting planet currently known. More importantly, its orbit puts it in the habitable zone, the region around a star where a terrestrial planet could have liquid water on its surface. While the planet is probably a gas-giant planet and thus not suitable for life, its discovery establishes that circumbinary planets can, and do, exist in habitable zones. If it has moons of the right size and composition its moons may well bear life as know it. Although much more difficult to detect than planets around single stars, the rich dynamics and wild climate changes make these circumbinary planets worth the effort to find. These two planets join the elite group of 4 previously known transiting circumbinary planets, Kepler-16, 34, 35 and 38. The new planetary system is located roughly 5000 light-years away, in the constellation Cygnus. The planets are much too far away to see, so they were discovered by the drop in brightness they cause when they transit (eclipse) their host stars. The loss of light caused by the silhouette is tiny, only 0.08% for planet b and 0.2% for planet c. By comparison, Venus blocked about 0.1% of the Sun's surface during its recent transit. Precise photometric data from NASA's Kepler space telescope allowed the transits and eclipses to be measured, which in turn provided the relative sizes of the objects. Spectroscopic data from telescopes at McDonald Observatory in Texas enabled the absolute sizes to be determined."Kepler-47 shows us that typical planetary architectures, with multiple planets in co-planar orbits, can form around two stars," said co-author Joshua Carter, a Hubble Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "We've learned that circumbinary planets can be like the planets in our own Solar System, but with two suns."The work was presented at the International Astronomical Union meeting by Dr. William Welsh, Professor of Astronomy at San Diego State University, on behalf of the Kepler Science Team."The thing I find most exciting," said Welsh, "is the potential for habitability in a circumbinary system. Kepler-47c is not likely to harbor life, but if it had large moons, those would be very interesting worlds."For further information see Kepler and NASA.Kepler View, an artist's depiction of the Kepler-47 system, image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle Tweet