Kepler-1647b tagged posts

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...