Kepler-16b; a newly discovered planet that orbits two Suns

[Weirdmaskman]

"NASA's kepler mission has discovered a planet where two suns set across the horizone instead of one.

The planet called kepler-16b is the most "tatooine like" planet yet found in our galaxy.

Tatooine is the name of the luke skywalker's home world in science fiction movie star wars. In this case the planet is not found to be habitable. It is a cold world with gaseous surface, but like tatooine it cycles two stars.

The parent star is smaller than our sun. One is 69% the mass of our sun and the other, only 20%.

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"

 

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/news/kepler-16b.html#maincontent

 

The bottleneck here is that with these two suns, kepler-16b is supposed to orbit each as other planets orbit the Sun in our solar system, but with the number of days it takes to complete its revolution (I don't know how fast it rotation), it appears that it revolves round both at a time.

Edited September 17, 2011 by Weirdmaskman