NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has discovered a planet called Kepler-16b that is orbiting two low-mass suns around 200 light-years from Earth, rather like Luke Skywalker’s home Tatooine featured in the “Star Wars” series.
Known as a circumbinary planet, this is the first time such a world has been observed.
A team of astronomers noticed the system because Kepler picked up multiple eclipses. Two of them were mutual eclipses—a primary eclipse when the larger sun is partially obscured by the smaller one, and a secondary one when the smaller sun is completely hidden by the large one.
However, the planet’s presence was detected due to seeming tertiary and quaternary eclipses, which revealed the stars were in varying positions in their orbits due to a world circling both stars.
“Much of what we know about the sizes of stars comes from such eclipsing binary systems, and most of what we know about the size of planets comes from transits,” said lead author Laurance Doyle of the SETI Institute in a press release.
“Kepler-16 combines the best of both worlds, with stellar eclipses and planetary transits in one system.”
The two stars are cooler than our sun as they have a smaller mass (20 and 69 per cent of the sun’s mass), giving Kepler-16b a cold surface temperature of approximately -100 to -150 degrees Fahrenheit.
This cool gaseous world has a similar size and mass to Saturn, and circles its stars every 229 days, while the two suns orbit each other every 41 days.
“This discovery is stunning,” said Carnegie’s Alan Boss in another press release. “Once again, what used to be science fiction has turned into reality.”
The findings were published in the journal Science on Sept. 16.
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