CfA: Tatooine-Like Planet Discovered

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CfA: Tatooine-Like Planet Discovered

Post by bystander » Thu Sep 15, 2011 7:41 pm

From Star Wars to Science Fact - Tatooine-like Planet Discovered
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics | 2011 Sept 15
Although cold and gaseous rather than a desert world, the newfound planet Kepler-16b is still the closest astronomers have come to discovering Luke Skywalker's home world of Tatooine. Like Tatooine, Kepler-16b enjoys a double sunset as it circles a pair of stars approximately 200 light-years from Earth. It's not thought to harbor life, but its discovery demonstrates the diversity of planets in our galaxy.

"Kepler-16b is the first confirmed, unambiguous example of a circumbinary planet - a planet orbiting not one, but two stars," said Josh Carter of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). "Once again, we're finding that our solar system is only one example of the variety of planetary systems Nature can create."

Carter is second author on the study announcing the discovery, which appears in the Sept. 15th issue of the journal Science. He is presenting the finding today at the Extreme Solar Systems II conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Kepler-16b weighs about a third as much as Jupiter and has a radius three-fourths that of Jupiter, making it similar to Saturn in both size and mass. It orbits its two parent stars every 229 days at a distance of 65 million miles - similar to Venus' 225-day orbit.

Both stars are smaller and cooler than our Sun. As a result, Kepler-16b is quite cold, with a surface temperature of around -100 to - 150° Fahrenheit.

NASA's Kepler mission detected the planet through what is known as a planetary transit - an event where a star dims when a planet crosses in front of it. The planet's discovery was complicated by the fact that the two stars in the system eclipse each other, causing the total brightness to dim periodically.

Astronomers noticed that the system's brightness sometimes dipped even when the stars were not eclipsing one another, hinting at a third body. The additional dimming events reappeared at irregular time intervals, indicating that the stars were in different positions in their orbit each time the third body passed. This showed that this third body was circling, not just one, but both stars.

Although Kepler data provided the relative sizes and masses of the stars and planet, astronomers needed more information to get absolute numbers. The crucial missing information came from the Tillinghast Reflector Echelle Spectrograph (TRES) on the 60-inch telescope at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory's Whipple Observatory in Arizona.

TRES monitored the changing velocity of the primary star as it moved around in its orbit. This yielded an orbital solution that set the scale of the Kepler-16 system. The team found that the two stars orbit each other every 41 days at an average distance of 21 million miles.

"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 and Kepler scientist Laurance Doyle of the SETI Institute. "Kepler-16 combines the best of both worlds, with stellar eclipses and planetary transits in one system."
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NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers a World Orbiting Two Stars

Post by bystander » Thu Sep 15, 2011 9:48 pm

NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers a World Orbiting Two Stars
NASA ARC Kepler | 2011 Sept 15
Click to play embedded YouTube video.
The existence of a world with a double sunset, as portrayed in the film Star Wars more than 30 years ago, is now scientific fact. NASA's Kepler mission has made the first unambiguous detection of a circumbinary planet -- a planet orbiting two stars -- 200 light-years from Earth.

Unlike Star Wars’ Tatooine, the planet is cold, gaseous and not thought to harbor life, but its discovery demonstrates the diversity of planets in our galaxy. Previous research has hinted at the existence of circumbinary planets, but clear confirmation proved elusive. Kepler detected such a planet, known as Kepler-16b, by observing transits, where the brightness of a parent star dims from the planet crossing in front of it.

"This discovery confirms a new class of planetary systems that could harbor life," Kepler principal investigator William Borucki said. "Given that most stars in our galaxy are part of a binary system, this means the opportunities for life are much broader than if planets form only around single stars. This milestone discovery confirms a theory that scientists have had for decades but could not prove until now."

A research team led by Laurance Doyle of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., used data from the Kepler space telescope, which measures dips in the brightness of more than 150,000 stars, to search for transiting planets. Kepler is the first NASA mission capable of finding Earth-size planets in or near the "habitable zone," the region in a planetary system where liquid water can exist on the surface of the orbiting planet.

Scientists detected the new planet in the Kepler-16 system, a pair of orbiting stars that eclipse each other from our vantage point on Earth. When the smaller star partially blocks the larger star, a primary eclipse occurs, and a secondary eclipse occurs when the smaller star is occulted, or completely blocked, by the larger star.

Astronomers further observed that the brightness of the system dipped even when the stars were not eclipsing one another, hinting at a third body. The additional dimming in brightness events, called the tertiary and quaternary eclipses, reappeared at irregular intervals of time, indicating the stars were in different positions in their orbit each time the third body passed. This showed the third body was circling, not just one, but both stars, in a wide circumbinary orbit.

The gravitational tug on the stars, measured by changes in their eclipse times, was a good indicator of the mass of the third body. Only a very slight gravitational pull was detected, one that only could be caused by a small mass. The findings are described in a new study published Friday, Sept. 16, in the journal Science.

"Most 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 Doyle, who also is the lead author and a Kepler participating scientist. "Kepler-16 combines the best of both worlds, with stellar eclipses and planetary transits in one system."

This discovery confirms that Kepler-16b is an inhospitable, cold world about the size of Saturn and thought to be made up of about half rock and half gas. The parent stars are smaller than our sun. One is 69 percent the mass of the sun and the other only 20 percent. Kepler-16b orbits around both stars every 229 days, similar to Venus’ 225-day orbit, but lies outside the system’s habitable zone, where liquid water could exist on the surface, because the stars are cooler than our sun.

"Working in film, we often are tasked with creating something never before seen," said visual effects supervisor John Knoll of Industrial Light & Magic, a division of Lucasfilm Ltd., in San Francisco. "However, more often than not, scientific discoveries prove to be more spectacular than anything we dare imagine. There is no doubt these discoveries influence and inspire storytellers. Their very existence serves as cause to dream bigger and open our minds to new possibilities beyond what we think we 'know.'"

JPL Image Slide Show
Kepler Links and Images

Tatooine-like planet discovered
Carnegie Institute of Science | 2011 Sept 15
A planet with two suns may be a familiar sight to fans of the Star Wars film series, but not, until now, to scientists. A team of researchers, including Carnegie’s Alan Boss, has discovered a planet that orbits around a pair of stars. Their remarkable findings will be published Sept. 16 in Science.

This is the first instance of astronomers finding direct evidence of a so-called circumbinary planet. A few other planets have been suspected of orbiting around both members of a dual-star system, but the transits of the circumbinary planet have never been detected previously.

The team, led by Laurance Doyle of the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe at the SETI Institute, used photometric data from the NASA Kepler space telescope, which monitors the brightness of 155,000 stars.

They found the binary star system by detecting a system where the stars eclipsed each other from the perspective of the Kepler spacecraft. These stars have two eclipses: A primary eclipse when the larger star is partially blocked by the smaller star and a secondary eclipse where the smaller star is fully blocked by the larger star.

But the researchers also noticed other times when the brightness of the two stars dropped, even when they were not in an eclipse position. This pattern suggested that there was likely a third object involved. The fact that these so-called tertiary and quaternary eclipses recurred after varying intervals of time, and were of different depths, indicated that the stars were in different positions in their orbit at each instance. This result showed that the tertiary and quaternary eclipses were being caused by something circling both stars, and not an object circling one or the other star.

Measurements of the variations in the timing of all four types of eclipses, resulting from the mutual gravitational interactions of the two stars and the third body, demonstrated that the third object was, indeed, a planet. Their work indicates that the planet is less massive than Jupiter, possibly comparable in mass to Saturn, and that the larger of the two binary stars is smaller than our Sun.

“This discovery is stunning,” Boss said. “Once again, what used to be science fiction has turned into reality.”

UCSB Scientist Contributes to First Discovery of a Planet With Two ‘Suns'
University of California, Santa Barbara | 2011 Sept 15
UC Santa Barbara astrophysicist Avi Shporer is part of the NASA team that has found the first known planet with two "suns," an idea popularized by the 1977 movie "Star Wars." The discovery is published this week in the journal Science.

In the iconic scene from "Star Wars," Luke Skywalker gazes into the distance as two suns set on the horizon. This type of planet is called a circumbinary planet, meaning it orbits a binary star system, as opposed to a single star like our sun. Circumbinary planets have been pursued by astronomers for decades. Although some scientists have claimed to detect such a planet in the past, none of those claims have been widely accepted by the scientific community.

The Science article reports the first clear detection of a circumbinary planet. The system is called Kepler-16, and it is the 16th planetary system discovered by NASA's Kepler space telescope. It is located approximately 220 light years from our sun, near the constellation Cygnus, in the Milky Way galaxy.

"It is the combination of the unprecedented precision and the continuous observations from space that allowed the detection of Kepler-16," said Shporer, who is also a researcher with the UCSB-affiliated Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (LCOGT) based in Goleta.

At first, the system was identified as an eclipsing binary star, a system of two stars orbiting each other and showing eclipses once every orbital period. Excitement within the Kepler team grew when the scientists were able to identify transits –– small, shallow eclipses induced by a small body such as a planet as it eclipses its parent stars. Further analysis confirmed that these transits are indeed induced by a planet in an orbit around both stars.

"This system is so fascinating since it is viewed edge-on, and all three bodies –– the two stars and the planet –– are all eclipsing each other," said Laurance Doyle of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI), lead author of the Science paper.

Kepler is a NASA discovery-class mission designed to look for Earth-like planets orbiting Sun-like stars in their habitable zone. Kepler is looking for these planets by continuously monitoring the light intensity of over 150,000 stars simultaneously. Kepler's high sensitivity makes it capable of detecting the minute decrease in a star's light caused by a small planet crossing the line of sight to the star, thereby momentarily blocking a small fraction of the light coming from the star.

"The transits and mutual eclipses enable a detailed characterization of the system, including the mass and radius of all objects and their orbits," said Shporer.

The depth of an eclipse gives a sense of the size of the eclipsing body. In the case of Kepler-16, the exact timing of the eclipses is affected by the gravitational pull of the planet. Although the planet's mass is small relative to the two stars, it is able to slightly affect their orbit, making the stellar eclipses occur earlier or later, by up to a minute, compared to a constant period model. As for the planetary transits, analysis of Kepler's measurements is challenging because the timing of the transits deviates significantly from a constant period model, since each transit occurs at a different orbital phase of the inner star.

The planet's orbital period is 229 days, while the stellar binary has a 41-day orbit. Although the planet's orbital period is close to that of Venus in our solar system, it is not an Earth-like, terrestrial planet. Its radius and mass are similar to those of Saturn, making it a gas giant planet. The two stars are both smaller than the Sun. The bigger of the two, the primary, measures 69 percent of the Sun's mass and 65 percent of its radius. The smaller star, the secondary, is considerably smaller, with 20 percent of the Sun's mass and 23 percent of its radius. In fact, the secondary star is the smallest low-mass star to have its mass and radius measured at such high precision.

Ground-based observations are an important part of the Kepler project. "At LCOGT, we are using our telescopes as part of the large effort carried out by U.S. astronomers and others, to follow-up and accurately characterize the detections made by Kepler," said Tim Brown, scientific director of LCOGT and an adjunct professor of physics at UCSB. Brown is an important member of the Kepler team.

The Kepler-16 discovery is one of a series of discoveries made by Kepler since its launch in March 2009. Shporer said the most interesting ones are probably yet to come as Kepler continues to monitor the stars.

Kepler-16: A Transiting Circumbinary Planet - L. R. Doyle et al Spin-Orbit Alignment for the Circumbinary Planet Host Kepler-16A - J. N. Winn et al
  • arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1109.3198 > 14 Sep 2011 (v1), 22 Sep 2011 (v2)
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Re: CfA: Tatooine-Like Planet Discovered

Post by bystander » Fri Sep 16, 2011 7:14 pm

NASA's Kepler Discovery Confirms First Planet Orbiting Two Stars
NASA JPL-Caltech | Kepler | 2011 Sept 15

NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers a World Orbiting Two Stars
NASA ARC | Kepler | 2011 Sept 15

Kepler Discovers a Planet with Two Suns
NASA Science News | Dr. Tony Phillips | 2011 Sept 15

New Exoplanet Discovery: Is Life Imitating Star Wars
Wired Science | Adam Mann | 2011 Sept 15

Weird Exoplanet Discovered Orbiting Two Stars
Discovery News | Irene Klotz | 2011 Sept 15

On Kepler-16b, shadows come in pairs
Science News | Nadia Drake | 2011 Sept 15

Astronomers discover a wretched hive of scum and villainy
Discover.com | Bad Astronomy | 2011 Sept 15

Kepler Mission Discovers “Tatooine-like” Planet
Universe Today | Ray Sanders | 2011 Sept 15

Twin Suns: Better Than One?
Jennifer Ouellette | Cocktail Party Physics
Scientific American Blogs | 2011 Sept 15

Bounty of New Exoplanet Discoveries Includes a World Orbiting a Binary Star
Scientific American | Rachel Kaufman | 2011 Sept 15

A Planet Orbiting Two Suns
SKy & Telescope | Shweta Krishnan | 2011 Sept 15

Astrophile: The most surreal sunset in the universe
New Scientist | David Shiga | 2011 Sept 15

Look Skywatcher! Twin Suns of Real-Life 'Tatooine' Planet Visible in Binoculars
Space.com | Mike Wall | 2011 Sept 15

Planet Like 'Star Wars' Tatooine Discovered Orbiting 2 Suns
Space.com | Charles Q. Choi | 2011 Sept 15

What Would Earth Be Like with Two Suns?
Space.com | Natalie Wolchover, Life's Little Mysteries | 2011 Sept 15

'Tatooine' Alien Planets Should Be Common, Scientists Say
Space.com | Mike Wall | 2011 Sept 16

Photos: NASA Discovers Real-Life 'Tatooine' Planet With 2 Suns
Space.com | Staff | 2011 Sept 16
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circumbinary planets

Post by neufer » Fri Sep 16, 2011 7:48 pm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumbinary_planet wrote:
<<A circumbinary planet is a planet that orbits two stars instead of one. Because of the close proximity and orbit of some binary stars, the only way for planets to form is by forming outside the orbit of the two stars. Currently there are only five confirmed systems of circumbinary planets: PSR B1620-26, HW Virginis, Kepler-16, DP Leonis, and NN Serpentis.

The first confirmed circumbinary extrasolar planet was found orbiting the system PSR B1620-26, which contains a millisecond pulsar and a white dwarf and is located in the globular cluster M4. The existence of the third body was first reported in 1993, and was suggested to be a planet based on 5 years of observational data. In 2003 the planet was characterised as being 2.5 times the mass of Jupiter in a low eccentricity orbit with a semimajor axis of 23 AU.

Announced in 2008, the eclipsing binary system HW Virginis, comprising a subdwarf B star and a red dwarf, was announced to be the host of a planetary system. The inner and outer planets have masses at least 8.47 and 19.23 times that of Jupiter respectively, and have orbital periods of 9 and 16 years. The outer planet is sufficiently massive that it may be considered to be a brown dwarf under some definitions of the term, but the discoverers argue that the orbital configuration implies it formed like a planet from a circumbinary disc. Both planets may have accreted additional mass when the primary star lost material during its red giant phase.

The binary star system HD 98800 B is surrounded by a disc which may be in the process of forming planets. HD 98800 B is itself a member of a quadruple star system.

Claims of a planet discovered via microlensing, orbiting the close binary pair MACHO-1997-BLG-41, were announced in 1999. The planet was said to be in a wide orbit around the two red dwarf companions, but the claims were later retracted, as it turned out the detection could be better explained by the orbital motion of the binary stars themselves.

Several attempts have been made to detect planets around the eclipsing binary system CM Draconis, itself part of the triple system GJ 630.1. The eclipsing binary has been surveyed for transiting planets, but no conclusive detections were made and eventually the existence of all the candidate planets was ruled out. More recently, efforts have been made to detect variations in the timing of the eclipses of the stars caused by the reflex motion associated with an orbiting planet, but at present no discovery has been confirmed. The orbit of the binary stars is eccentric, which is unexpected for such a close binary as tidal forces ought to have circularised the orbit. This may indicate the presence of a massive planet or brown dwarf in orbit around the pair whose gravitational effects maintain the eccentricity of the binary.

Circumbinary discs that may indicate processes of planet formation have been found around several stars, and are in fact common around binaries with separations less than 3 AU. One notable example is in the HD 98800 system, which comprises two pairs of binary stars separated by around 34 AU. The binary subsystem HD 98800 B, which consists of two stars of 0.70 and 0.58 solar masses in a highly eccentric orbit with semimajor axis 0.983 AU, is surrounded by a complex dust disc that is being warped by the gravitational effects of the mutually-inclined and eccentric stellar orbits. The other binary subsystem, HD 98800 A, is not associated with significant amounts of dust.

On 15th September 2011, astronomers announced the discovery of a real planet that orbits two suns. The planet, called Kepler-16b, is about 200 light years from Earth, in the constellation Cygnus, and is believed to be a frozen world of rock and gas, about the size of Saturn. It orbits two stars that are also circling each other, one about two-thirds the size of our sun, the other about a fifth the size of our sun. Each orbit takes 229 days, while Kepler-16b orbits the system's center of mass every 225 days; the stars eclipse each other every three weeks or so. Scientists made the finding through NASA's Kepler spacecraft, which launched in 2009 and has been a driving force in the recent explosion in the discovery of distant planets.>>
http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php? ... 02#p138702
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Re: CfA: Tatooine-Like Planet Discovered

Post by Ann » Fri Sep 16, 2011 7:59 pm

NIce video, bystander! It was fun to see Luke skywalker gaze into the double sunset and compare science fiction with reality. :clap: :clap:

It was slightly less fun to see the "Bird's Eye View of Kepler-16 System — (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle)" illustration of the Kepler 16 system and the comparison with the Sun. The K-type primary of Kepler 16 is seen to be brilliantly white, while our Sun is egg yolk yellow. Yeah, well, I don't think so.

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Planet with two suns

Post by JohnD » Fri Sep 16, 2011 8:59 pm

Deleted.
I returned to find my new thread gone, and realised that this thread was a more appropriate place, so reposted it. Meanwhile, bystander was merging it and it must have been in Limbo.

Please see my thread-2 below.
John
PS Thanks, bystander!
Last edited by JohnD on Fri Sep 16, 2011 10:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Kepler-16

Post by JohnD » Fri Sep 16, 2011 9:38 pm

Kepler-16 a circumbinary gas giant, or as the press have it, Tattooine!!!!!

For a more sober presentation, see: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6049/1602
and a video and sensible press copy at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/ ... intcmp=239

So a three body solar sytems IS possible!
But every simulation shows chaotic orbits. This one is the nearest I can find to Kepler-16, but you can't start it with any velocity on the 'planet'
http://www.upscale.utoronto.ca/PVB/Harr ... eBody.html

So how is this possible? Could there be Trojans or something stabilising it?
John

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Re: Kepler-16

Post by Chris Peterson » Fri Sep 16, 2011 10:29 pm

JohnD wrote:So a three body solar sytems IS possible!
But every simulation shows chaotic orbits.
All real-world systems with more than two bodies are chaotic. That includes our own Solar System. But "chaotic" doesn't mean that a system can't be essentially stable over a very long time, and there are lots of simulations of binary star planetary systems that show this kind of stability. The simplest is just to have the two stars close together, and the orbiting planet very far away from them.

In this case, from the paper:
To investigate the long-term (secular) changes in the orbital parameters, and to check on the system’s stability, we integrated the best-fitting model forward in time by two million years. Within the context of our gravitational three-body model, secular variations occur on a time scale of about 40 years, without any significant excursions in orbital distance that would have led to instability.
Chris

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Re: CfA: Tatooine-Like Planet Discovered

Post by BMAONE23 » Sat Sep 17, 2011 3:58 pm

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

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For those who wish to sing-a-long:

Post by neufer » Sat Sep 17, 2011 4:27 pm

A long, long time ago,
In a galaxy far away,
Naboo was under an attack.

And I thought me and Qui-Gon Jinn,
Could talk the Federation in
to maybe cutting them a little slack.

But their response, it didn't thrill us,
They locked the doors and tried to kill us.
we escaped from that gas,
And met Jar Jar and Boss Nass.

We took a Bongo from the scene,
And we went to Theed to see the Queen.
We all wound up on Tatooine,
That's where we found this boy.


{Chorus}: Oh my, my
This here Anakin guy.
May be Vader,
Some day later,
Now he's just a small fry.
He left his home and kissed his mommy goodbye,
Saying 'soon I'm gonna be a Jedi,
Soon I'm gonna be a Jedi!'


Did you know this junkyard slave
Isn't even old enough to shave?
But he can use the force, they say.
Oh, do you see him hittin' on the Queen?
Though he's just nine and she's fourteen.
Yeah, he's probably gonna marry her, some day.

Well, I know he built C-3PO,
And I heard how fast his pod can go.
And we were broke, it's true,
So we made a wager or two.

Well, he was a pre-pubescent flyin' ace.
And the minute Jabba started off that race,
Well, I knew who'd win first place,
Oh yes, it was our boy!


We started singing: {Chorus}

Well, we finally got to Coruscant,
The Jedi council, we knew would want
To see how good the boy could be.
So we took him there and we told the tale,
How his midichlorions were off the scale,
and he might fullfill that prophecy.

Oh, the council was impressed, of course,
Could he bring balance to the force?
They interviewed the kid,
Oh, training they forbid!

Because, Yoda sensed in him much fear
And Qui-Gon said, 'now listen here!
Just stick in your pointy ear,
I still, will teach this boy!'


He was singing: {Chorus}

We caught a ride back to Naboo,
'Cause Queen Amidala wanted to,
I frankly would've liked to stay.
We all fought in that epic war,
And it wasn't long at all before,
Little hot-shot flew his plane and saved the day.

And in the end some Gungans died.
Some ships blew up
And some pilots fried.
A lot of folks were croakin',
The battle droids were broken!

And the Jedi I admire most,
Met up with Darth Maul, and now he's toast
I'm still here, and he's a ghost
I guess, I'll train the boy.


And I was singing: {Chorus}

And We were singing: {Chorus}
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Re: CfA: Tatooine-Like Planet Discovered

Post by JohnD » Sat Sep 17, 2011 9:21 pm

Thank you, Chris!
And for anyone else who like me had to look it up, in astronomy "secular" means, "a phenomenon takes a tremendous amount of time to unfold, and occurs gradually. Secular change, for example, is a long-standing, continuous (and nonperiodic) change to a system." I am also educated to find that it has that meaning in literature too, as well as meaning worldly, as opposed to spiritual or religious. From the Latin 'saecularis', a generation or age.

Actually, some of those apparently chaotic orbits of the three-body animations were periodic, if you watch them long enough. But then chaos is not chaotic, is it?
John

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Re: CfA: Tatooine-Like Planet Discovered

Post by alirahL » Thu Sep 22, 2011 9:43 am

Amazing, how I wish I could be a part of the team who helps the scientist to discover new planets. The quest for human friendly planets in other solar systems has been massive for years in the United States. Last Dec., the Planet Hunters project launched to ask for internet users' help in identifying potential exoplanets. Now, Yale and the Planet Hunters have announced the finding of exoplanets that the Kepler group will be looking further into. Resource for this article: Citizen science racks up another win with Planet Hunters. This discoveries really excite me a lot.

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