Newly Discovered Planet Has Twin Sunsets

Newly Discovered Planet Has Twin Sunsets – NASA astronomers recently announced their first discovery of a planet orbiting a binary star system. Officially known as Kepler-16b, the planet has been nicknamed “Tatooine” after Luke Skywalker’s home planet from the original Star Wars film. But unlike that fictional planet, this one is not inhabitable by any known life forms. And it exists in our own Milky Way, not some galaxy far, far away.

From earth’s vantage point, astronomers observed Kepler-16b crossing in front of its two parent stars – a phenomenon they call “transit.” Gravity holds the stars in orbit around one another, and the planet’s orbit circles both of them.

The discovery is a major success for NASA’s Kepler space observatory, which was launched in 2009. The observatory contains a photometer, a sophisticated instrument that measures how much light stars emit. It enables astronomers to detect when stars transit one another and when planets transit stars.

Announcing the (so far) one-of-a-kind find, NASA noted that Kepler-16b likely contains no liquid water and is uninhabitable since its orbit is outside the star system’s habitable zone. Still, NASA affirmed that the discovery

“confirms a new class of planetary systems that could harbor life.”

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.

Newly Discovered Planet Has Twin Sunsets