circumbinary planets tagged posts

This artist’s concept illustrates Kepler-16b, the first planet known to orbit two stars – what’s called a circumbinary planet. The planet, which can be seen in the foreground, was discovered by NASA’s Kepler mission. New research from the University of Washington indicates that certain shot-period binary star systems eject circumbinary planets as a consequence of the host stars’ evolution.NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle

Planets orbiting “short-period” binary stars, or stars locked in close orbital embrace, can be ejected off into space as a consequence of their host stars’ evolution, according to new research from the University of Washington...

Artist view of a planet orbiting two aging stars that exchange material and spiral closer together. Credit: Jon Lomberg

Planets that revolve around 2 suns may surprisingly survive the violent late stages of the stars’ lives, according to new research from NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre and York University. The finding is surprising because planets orbiting close to a single sun, like Mercury and Venus in our solar system, would be destroyed when the aging star swells into a red giant. The study found that planets orbiting binary stars, also referred to as circumbinary planets or “Tatooine worlds” after the iconic planetary home of Luke Skywalker in Star Wars – often escape death and destruction by moving out to wider orbits.

“This is very different from what will happen in our own solar ...

This is a comparison of the relative sizes of several Kepler circumbinary planets. Kepler-1647 b is substantially larger than any of the previously known circumbinary planets. Credit: Lynette Cook

If you cast your eyes toward the constellation Cygnus, you’ll be looking in the direction of the largest planet yet discovered around a double-star system. It’s too faint to see with the naked eye, but a team from Goddard Space Flight Center and San Diego State University, used Kepler Space Telescope to identify the new planet, Kepler-1647b, 3,700 light-years away and ~4.4 billion years old, roughly the same age as Earth. The stars are similar to the sun, with one slightly larger than our home star and the other slightly smaller...

A team of scientists has discovered a highly unusual planetary system comprised of a sun-like star, a dwarf star, and an enormous planet “dancing” in between. The dwarf star and the planet have been gravitationally influencing each other for millions of years. Specifically, the planet’s eccentricity (the amount it deviates from being perfectly circular) and orbital inclination, meaning its angle relative to the equatorial plane of the primary star, have been oscillating back and forth in a process known as Kozai oscillations — and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Credit: Timothy Rodigas

A team of scientists has discovered a highly unusual planetary system comprised of a sun-like star, a dwarf star, and an enormous planet sandwiched in between...