Video Scientists Discover Giant New Planet Orbiting Two Suns

The largest planet yet discovered around a double-star system.

The new planet, Kepler-1647b, discovered by a team of astronomers. The discovery was announced on June 13th in San Diego at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
The research has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.

Kepler-1647 is 3,700 light-years away and approximately 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.

The planet has a mass and radius nearly identical to that of Jupiter, making it the largest transiting circumbinary planet ever found.

Planets that orbit two stars are known as circumbinary planets, or sometimes “Tatooine” planets, after Luke Skywalker’s home world in “Star Wars.”

The planet takes 1,107 days – just over three years – to orbit its host stars, the longest period of any confirmed transiting exoplanet found so far.

The planet is also much further away from its stars than any other circumbinary planet, breaking with the tendency for circumbinary planets to have close-in orbits. Interestingly, its orbit puts the planet with in the so-called habitable zone–the range of distances from a star where liquid water might pool on the surface of an orbiting planet.

Like Jupiter, however, Kepler-1647b is a gas giant, making the planet unlikely to host life. Yet if the planet has large moons, they could potentially be suitable for life.

Alien moons could be more likely to host life than Earth-like planets. scientist

Washington Post
Read more here: http://tinyurl.com/zmp4xge

Clips, images credit: ESO, ESA/HUBBLE & NASA

Music credit: The Temperature of the Air on the Bow of the Kaleetan by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Source: http://chriszabriskie.com/uvp/
Artist: http://chriszabriskie.com/