Kepler-16: Exoplanets around binary star systems DO exist
15 Sep 2011, 15:00 UTC
By Dr. Franck Marchis, SETI Institute Kepler-16 is another great discovery coming from the Kepler telescope, the 10th NASA Discovery mission which is devoted to finding Earth-size exoplanets by monitoring variations of brightness due to transit. Today the Kepler team found a circumbinary exoplanet, an exoplanet orbiting a binary star system. Did they find Tatooine?…
By Dr. Franck Marchis, SETI Institute
Kepler-16 is another great discovery coming from the Kepler telescope, the 10th NASA Discovery mission which is devoted to finding Earth-size exoplanets by monitoring variations of brightness due to transit. Today the Kepler team found a circumbinary exoplanet, an exoplanet orbiting a binary star system. Did they find Tatooine?
Artistic view of the Kepler-16(AB)b exoplanet (a saturn-like exoplanet) in orbit around its 2 stars in the background.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle
In the large 105 deg2 field of view of the Kepler spacecraft, ~156,000 stars are being almost continuously observed by the 0.95m telescope. In 2010, the star number KIC 12644769 of the Kepler Input Catalog quickly got the attention of the Kepler team when they realized that it was an eclipsing binary star system, one of 1,879 detected after 44 days of operation. Binary stars, or pairs ...
