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Tatooine-like planet discovered

Date:
September 15, 2011
Source:
Carnegie Institution
Summary:
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.
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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 are 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."

Funding for the Kepler Discovery mission was provided by NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Various researchers were funded by the NASA Kepler Participating Scientist program, NASA Hubble Fellowship grants awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for research in Astronomy Inc. for NASA, support from the NASA Origins program, and the Hungarian OTKA grant.


Story Source:

Materials provided by Carnegie Institution. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


Journal Reference:

  1. Laurance R. Doyle, Joshua A. Carter, Daniel C. Fabrycky, Robert W. Slawson, Steve B. Howell, Joshua N. Winn, Jerome A. Orosz, Andrej Prsa, William F. Welsh, Samuel N. Quinn, David Latham, Guillermo Torres, Lars A. Buchhave, Geoffrey W. Marcy, Jonathan J. Fortney, Avi Shporer, Eric B. Ford, Jack J. Lissauer, Darin Ragozzine, Michael Rucker, Natalie Batalha, Jon M. Jenkins, William J. Borucki, David Koch, Christopher K. Middour, Jennifer R. Hall, Sean McCauliff, Michael N. Fanelli, Elisa V. Quintana, Matthew J. Holman, Douglas A. Caldwell, Martin Still, Robert P. Stefanik, Warren R. Brown, Gilbert A. Esquerdo, Sumin Tang, Gabor Furesz, John C. Geary, Perry Berlind, Michael L. Calkins, Donald R. Short, Jason H. Steffen, Dimitar Sasselov, Edward W. Dunham, William D. Cochran, Alan Boss, Michael R. Haas, Derek Buzasi, Debra Fischer. Kepler-16: A Transiting Circumbinary Planet. Science, 2011; 333 (6049): 1602-1606 DOI: 10.1126/science.1210923

Cite This Page:

Carnegie Institution. "Tatooine-like planet discovered." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 15 September 2011. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110915141231.htm>.
Carnegie Institution. (2011, September 15). Tatooine-like planet discovered. ScienceDaily. Retrieved December 22, 2024 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110915141231.htm
Carnegie Institution. "Tatooine-like planet discovered." ScienceDaily. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110915141231.htm (accessed December 22, 2024).

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