Tech | September 16, 2011 | 11 comments

Planet orbiting two suns found - weirder than fiction

source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14940885

Image
pdy
  • pdy
  • added this
A planet orbiting two suns - the first confirmed alien world of its kind - has been found by Nasa's Kepler telescope, the US space agency announced.

It may resemble the planet Tatooine from the film Star Wars, but scientists say Luke Skywalker, or anyone at all, is unlikely to be living there.

Named Kepler-16b, it is thought to be an uninhabitable cold gas giant, like Saturn.

The newly detected body lies some 200 light years from Earth.

Though there have been hints in the past that planets circling double stars might exist, scientists say this is the first confirmation.

'Stunning'
It means when the day ends on Kepler-16b, there is a double sunset, they say.

Kepler-16b's two suns are smaller than ours - at 69% and 20% of the mass of our sun - making the surface temperature an estimated -100 to -150F (-73 to -101C).

The planet orbits its two suns every 229 days at a distance of 65m miles (104m km) - about the same solar orbit as Venus.

The Kepler telescope, launched in 2009, is designed to scour our section of the Milky Way galaxy for Earth-like planets.

"This is really a stunning measurement by Kepler," said Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution for Science, a co-author of the study.

"The real exciting thing is there's a planet sitting out there orbiting around these two stars."

Kepler finds stars whose light is regularly dimmed, which means there is an orbited planet between the star and the telescope.

Nasa's scientists saw additional dips in the light in both stars at alternating but regular times, confirming the dual orbit of the planet.

The finding was reported in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
  1. groups:
    Community,   News and Politics,   Tech,   WTF,   10 more
  2. tags:
    Space,  NASA,  Sun,  Planet,  3 more
  3.     
    |

11 comments // Planet orbiting two suns found - weirder than fiction

  • dudefromtherock
  • remanns
  • Gravity_Man
    • 0
      Gravity_Man  
    • remanns:

      Because we're... DRUNKER!!! Drunk on the wine of our own greatness??? YES! We are after all the ones who were so great we could burn down the library in Egypt and still got technology!!!

      We watched Rome burn and still became Great!!! We're so great we burn ourselves just so we can watch ourselves heal!!!

      I'm Greedy for Coco Puffs, Greedy for Coco Puffs, Greedy for Coco Puffs, Greedy for Coco Puffs, Greedy for Coco Puffs, Greedy for Coco Puffs, Greedy for Coco Puffs.

    • 9 months ago
  • remanns
  • Gravity_Man
    • 0
      Gravity_Man  
    • remanns:

      Greedy for Xylitol-not-Sugar Coco Puffs!, Greedy for Xylitol-not-Sugar Coco Puffs!, Greedy for Xylitol-not-Sugar Coco Puffs!, Greedy for Xylitol-not-Sugar Coco Puffs!, Greedy for Xylitol-not-Sugar Coco Puffs!, Greedy for Xylitol-not-Sugar Coco Puffs!

    • 9 months ago
  • remanns
  • Gravity_Man
    • 0
      Gravity_Man  
    • remanns:

      Drunk on Weird Fiction hmm, that sounds like a movie I watched once with two young guys and a computer that turned into a beautiful woman. I LIKE WEIRD.

      /> A weird radio news report just now, the guy says that satellite due to ooh "de-orbit" is in a weird orbit that shifts position every 1 and a half hours. Dang. Which means they cannot predict who it's going to de-orbit onto. I LIKE THAT WORD => DE-ORBIT.

      /> I had somethin' REALLY WEIRD happen to me this past Sunday. I made a post on another blog where I pointed out the origin of the word job (as in employment) had to without a doubt been adopted from the suffering Bible man Job. Originally someone had stated that being employed under someone was LIKE BEING REDUCED TO THE BIBLE'S JOB, who was covered with boils and other afflictions, family killed and so on.

      /> THE WEIRD PART came later in the day when it occurred to me I had repeated the Job+job word a lot of times, which of course I had done so it would stand out to Internet search engines whenever anyone is looking for a job. It's a well-known SEO trick. Okay, so I went back and counted the number of times and the total was 23. It so happened the time my post went online was 4:23pm, and the Post #2305.

      /> THAT WAS WEIRD. The time on the left upper corner with the post# in the right upper corner and the last occurrence of the word "job" at the very bottom CONNECTED BY LINES MADE A TRIANGLE. Coincidence? Sure, until later some more after a nap I awoke and thought WAIT A MINUTE, so I looked again and it occurred to me that 23 + 23 + (23 times) added together was 69.

      /> NO BIG WHOOP? Well oops, it was a big whoop because 69 days from 9/18/2011 is November 26, my birthday. So we are Friend Remanns on some kind of Langoliers/Bermuda TRIANGLE Rod serling Twilight Zone countdown, to Nov. 26 2011. Something is going to happen BIG by 11/26/11. Something is going to happen BIG by 11/26/11. I think it's a warning from GOD because OH NOES => 11/26/11 is a Sabbath & Saturday.

      /> Then Remanns it got even weirder the following day. I went to Site Analytics to check my web stats for the previous day (9/18, the day of the 69) and Lo & Behold my website had had 69 Visitors all day Sunday. Weird coincidence? Yeah, we could still say that so then a new thread on Current was posted for a big quake in India-Nepal-Tibet and the magnitude was 6.9!!!

      /> Remanns ol' Buiddy if we were plotting a wormhole destination like they did in the movie Stargate we have more than enough points in Space. There's 3 23's = 69, + a 69 + a 69, not to mention they are all oranges (different measures). Between Now and November 26 2011 something really big has been charted FOR ALL MANKIND TO EXPERIENCE. Here's the link for the post following #2305 and the link to 2305 is in it => http://forums.signonsandiego.com/showpost.php?p=4476132&postcount=2306

    • 8 months ago
  • Gravity_Man
    • 0
      Gravity_Man  

    • So D'Artagnion, if we leave now at Light Speed we don't age maybe 3-4 years, unless in suspended animation lite, and then when we return if we keep the spaceship facing backwards we go into Earth's Past and start the entire environmental movement in 1885, right?

      But if we do that we would lose all the Back to the Future movies.

    • 9 months ago
  • remanns
  • remanns
  • sbacker
more from Tech:
from the community

top videos