Astronomers using the Kepler telescope found the first known double-star planet just last September Kepler-16, a gassy oddball orb the size of Saturn that circles a pair of stars 200 light-years from Earth, like the planet Tatooine in the "Star Wars" films.
Astronomers using the Kepler telescope found the first known double-star planet just last September Kepler-16b, a gassy oddball orb the size of Saturn that circles a pair of stars 200 light-years from Earth, like the planet Tatooine in the "Star Wars" films.
In recent years, the Ramon region, resembling the fictional Star Wars planet of Tatooine, has become an adventure tourism hotspot.
Dr Swartzlander's prototypes have performed well in laboratory tests in which lasers played the parts of star and planet.
The technique uses distant light amplified by the gravity of a massive star or planet to create an astronomical magnifying lens.
An array is needed because a single mirror big enough to do the job of separating star from planet would be too large to launch.
But in constructing the first atmospheric model that has the orbital dynamics of a star-planet-moon system fully included, astronomers Duncan Forgan, at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, and David Kipping, at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, turn that idea on its head.
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Two researchers (separated by the Atlantic ocean, rather than the English Channel), have used gravitational perturbations that affect comets, rather than planets, to predict the existence of something that might be a planet, or might be a star depending mainly on how you define a planet or a star.
The planet's host star is dimmer and cooler than our sun, but the planet is also 15% closer than we are to the sun.
Since Kepler finds planets by measuring the tiny dips in a star's brightness when a dark planet moves across the face of that star, less accurate photometry means Earth-like planets will be too hard to find.
The conclusion: The tiny bright blob was an object still embedded in the disk of material around the parent star, suggesting a planet in the earliest stages of coming into being.
The planet orbits a star about half as big as our Sun, positioned some 9, 000 light-years away.
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The conclusion: The blob was an object embedded in the material around the star, suggesting a nascent planet.
During such a transit, the observed brightness of the star drops slightly because the planet blocks a part of the starlight.
This corresponds more closely to the case of a planet around another star, in which the stellar disc cannot be resolved.
On 3 November, NASA and the European Space Agency announced that the Hubble Space Telescope had captured the first visible-light snapshot of a planet orbiting another star.
Located 168 light years from Earth orbiting the star Kappa Andromedae, this planet is about 12.8 times more massive than Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system.
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The second piece of evidence pointing to is the eccentric orbit of an existing planet around the star, which is in an orbit not normally expected in this type of system.
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The transit method for finding planets searches for the small drop in brightness of a star that occurs when a planet passes in front of it and blocks some of its light.
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Since the discovery in 1995 of a planet around the star 51 Pegasi by Michel Mayor and his colleague Didier Queloz, more than 270 exoplanets have been found - mostly around Sun-like stars.
However, because the light from any planet orbiting a star at which the lens is aimed directly is arriving from a point slightly to the side of that star, it is able to shine through essentially unaltered.
The first direct image of a planet orbiting around another star is still some years away.
The planet orbits its host star, or brown dwarf, with an orbital radius similar to that of Venus.
Moreover, now that the glare of the star has been removed, that planet's glow is more easily discernible.
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The Independent is among the papers to reveal that astronomers have discovered a planet straight out of Star Wars.
The research team will be continuing its observation of the system in the hopes of finding another planet around the giant star.
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Astronomers say they have found a planet orbiting a distant star that's more like the Earth than any other found so far.
Another group of astronomers have come forward to say that they too have made observations of the planet seen orbiting the star HD 209458, which is 150 light-years from Earth.
Mr. JACK LISSAUER (NASA): This is likely to be or plausibly the first rocky planet around a normal star other than the sun, and in that sense it's a class of planets like Earth.
It stares at a fixed patch of sky, watching a field of more than 150, 000 stars for the tiny dips in starlight that occur if an orbiting planet passes between a star and the telescope.
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