Constellation Cygnus tagged posts

Molnar’s prediction is that a binary star (two stars orbiting each other) he is monitoring will merge and explode in 2022. Credit: Calvin College

Calvin College professor Larry Molnar et al are predicting a change to the night sky that will be visible to the naked eye. “It’s a 1-in-a-million chance that you can predict an explosion,” Molnar said. “It’s never been done before.” Molnar’s prediction is that a binary star he is monitoring will merge and explode in 2022, give or take a year; at which time the star will increase its brightness 10000X, becoming one of the brighter stars in the heavens for a time. The star will be visible as part of the constellation Cygnus, and will add a star to the recognizable Northern Cross star pattern.

Molnar’s exploration into the star known as KIC 98322...

This artist’s conception shows a star behind a shattered comet. One of the theories for KIC 8462852’s unusual dimming is the presence of debris from a collision or breakup of a planet or comet in the star’s system, creating a short-term cloud that blocks some starlight. Credit: Image is courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech

Star KIC 8462852 in constellation Cygnus has been raising eyebrows both in and outside of the scientific community for the past year. In 2015 a team of astronomers announced that the star underwent a series of very brief, non-periodic dimming events while it was being monitored by NASA’s Kepler space telescope, and no one could quite figure out what caused them. A new study from Carnegie’s Josh Simon and Caltech’s Ben Montet has deepened the mystery...

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...

An artist’s conception shows Kepler-36c as it might look from the surface of neighboring Kepler-36b. Credits: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics/David Aguilar.

1,530 light years away in constellation Cygnus, Kepler-36 is a sun-like star orbited by 2 known alien worlds. The inner planet, Kepler-36b is a so-called “super-Earth,” ie larger than our home planet but smaller than Neptune; the larger Kepler-36c, resembling the solar system’s outermost planet, is described as a “mini-Neptune.” What is unusual about this planetary system is that these 2 exoworlds have very close orbits, separated only by 0.013 astronomical units (AU)—5X the Earth-moon distance...