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Ananya

Nasa's Kepler Missions Puts Forth A System With Binary Stars

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Our solar system has 1 sun holding all the planets in their specific orbits with its gravitational pull.But now something weird has been discovered by NASA's Kepler mission that reveals that in Constellation Cygnus which lies 4900 light years away from our Earth multiple planets have been found orbiting 2 stars. The existence of such a system is reffered to as "Circumbinary Planetary System".

Earlier we did know that unlike our sun many stars are part of multiple - star systems where in 2 or more stars orbit around each other exerting a tremendous amount of gravitational pull capable of throwing young planets or careening them into one another. So the question always persisted that can such systems have planets in them.The latest Kepler discovery gives a green signal to that. In contrast to our singular solar system having 1 planet revolving around 1 star, in a circumbinary system a planet has to transit a moving target.In this new system called Kepler-47, 2 planets and a pair of stars that eclipse each other every 7.5 days from our vantage point on earth has been detected.In terms of size one of these 2 stars resemble to that of our sun but bearing only 84% brightness and the other one is 1/3rd in size as that of our sun.

And if a little attention is given on the details of the 2 planets, the inner planet Kepler-47b takes less than 50 days to orbit the twin stars and has 3 times radius as that of our earth and the outer planet called Kepler-47c orbits in 303 days giving it scope for being a "habitable zone" as one can hope of water to exist there although not truly hospitable for life but since its a gaseous giant slightly larger than Neptune one can expect water vapour clouds in its atmosphere.

Its said that weird climate exits in such circumbinary planets. On earth we have a stable source of light from Sun bearing a variation of solar energy we receive by sheer 0.1% but circumbinary planets can suffer variation of several percentages of solar energy in time scales ranging from days to weeks. Hence seasons there will be rapid and complicated.

 

For viewing images explaining Kepler mission please visit

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/main/index.html

Edited by Ananya (see edit history)

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