Cornell University | 2015 July 15
[c][youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSLjmNu0FsA[/youtube]NASA video describes the Kepler satellite's first discovery of a planetSibling suns – made famous in the “Star Wars” scene where Luke Skywalker gazes toward a double sunset – and the planets around them may be more common than we’ve thought, and Cornell astronomers are presenting new ideas on how to find them.
orbiting sibling suns in 2011. With the publication of this Cornell research,
astronomers may be able to find planets within compact binary systems.
(Credit: NASA/Ames Research Center)[/c][hr][/hr]
Astronomers could discover a plethora of planets around binary star systems (stars that rotate around each other) by measuring with high precision how stars move around each other, looking for disturbances exerted by possible exoplanets. So explains new research ... by Diego J. Munoz, Cornell postdoctoral researcher, and Dong Lai, professor of astronomy, in the College of Arts and Sciences.
What once was fictional as young Skywalker saw the double suns from Tatooine is astronomical reality four decades later. Normal binary suns orbit each other every eight to 100 days, and the Kepler telescope easily can detect those exoplanets (planets outside of our own solar system) as the planets transit (move across) each sun.
Trouble starts in compact binary sun systems – where sibling suns move closer together – making it difficult for the most advanced telescopes to find them. Essentially, for Kepler and other telescopes, the planetary orbital plane of these double suns and their accompanying planets might be out of whack – or misaligned – rendering them invisible to us. “The current observational strategy inevitably misses a population of Tatooine planets, but future observations may reveal their existence,” said Munoz. ...
Survival of Planets Around Shrinking Stellar Binaries - Diego J. Muñoz, Dong Lai
- Proceedings of the National Academy Sciences (online 09 July 2015) DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1505671112
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1505.05514 > 20 May 2015 (v1), 02 Jul 2015 (v2)
