Astronomers confirm first planet orbiting two stars
by Tim Stephens
Santa Cruz CA (SPX) Sep 19, 2011
by Tim Stephens
Santa Cruz CA (SPX) Sep 19, 2011
 The discovery confirms the newest member of the Kepler planet family, Kepler-16b, which is an inhospitable, cold world about the size of Saturn, and thought to be made up of about half rock and half gas. "The planet seems to be a denser version of Saturn," said Fortney, who used the mass and radius of the planet to calculate models of its interior structure. |
A world with multiple suns is a common trope in science fiction, as in the iconic double sunset in Star Wars. Scientific reality has now caught up, with a report from NASA's Kepler mission of the first unambiguous detection of a planet orbiting two stars.
Unlike the fictional planet Tatooine in Star Wars, the newly discovered planet is cold and gaseous and not thought to harbor life. But its discovery demonstrates the diversity of planets in our galaxy. The findings are described in a new study published in the September 16 issue of Science.
UC Santa Cruz astronomers Jonathan Fortney and Daniel Fabrycky both contributed to the study. "Kepler is finding all kinds of new planets that we could only imagine before," said Fortney, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC. "While we know of many planets that orbit one star in a binary system of two widely separated stars, this is a system where the planet formed around and orbits both stars."
Previous studies have found hints of planets orbiting binary stars, but clear confirmation has been elusive. The Kepler space telescope detects planets through what is known as a planetary transit, in which the brightness of a star dims as a result of a planet crossing in front of it. Scientists detected the new planet in the Kepler-16 system: a pair of orbiting stars that eclipse each other from our point of view on Earth.
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