Kepler discovers Tatooine-like planets
Various new exoplanets, planets in star systems other than our own, have been discovered by the Kepler space telescope.
Kepler-16b is a circumbinary exoplanet, having two host stars in close orbit, similar to the desert world of Tatooine in the Star Wars series. It has been joined by two newly discovered planets orbiting binary stars, Kepler-34b and Kepler-35b.
These two new planets are most likely gas giants similar to Jupiter; however they exist in a system where the host stars are far more like our own sun than the stars found in Kepler-16b’s system.
These observations have indicated to astronomers that exoplanets orbiting two stars might not be as rare as previously though, perhaps occurring in one percent of close binaries (systems with two stars).
“Kepler-34b is roughly 22 percent of the mass of Jupiter (69 times Earth’s mass) and 76 percent of Jupiter’s radius (8.6 times larger than the radius of Earth); Kepler-35b is about 13 percent of Jupiter’s mass and 73 percent of its radius. Both these planets are less massive than Kepler-16b (which is 33 percent of Jupiter’s mass), but all three worlds are giants rather than Earth-like,” according to a report on Ars Technica.
Read the full story at: Ars Technica.
Loading ...