According to an article entitled, "Planet with 2 suns discovered" at the CBC news website,
"A planet that orbits two suns at the same time — just like Tatooine in Star Wars — has been found for the first time."...."researchers combed through data collected by the Kepler telescope, which is focused on the part of the sky containing the constellations Cygnus and Lyra and is designed to look for planets outside our solar system"..."Doyle's team identified 2,000 eclipsing binaries, then carefully looked at them one at a time..."My eye was drawn to some extra eclipses that occurred out of sequence," Doyle said in a podcast interview with Science. Some were caused by a third star — that is, the two-star system turned out to be a three star system."
But in one case, the two stars were very small — just 20 per cent and 69 per cent as massive as the sun respectively — and the extra "eclipses" dimmed the stars only very slightly, indicating that the object that caused the dips was planet-sized."
"Based on careful measurements, the team figured out that the two stars orbit each other every 41 days, and the Saturn-sized planet orbits the two stars every 229 days. The planet is denser than Saturn, suggesting that it contains rock as well as gas, and its distance from the centre of its orbit is about 70 per cent of the distance between the Earth and the sun."
"The planet is thought to be cold and not habitable."
source:http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2011/09/15/technology-planet-suns.html
According to an article at the following link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/video/2011/sep/15/kepler16b-planet , has been given the name, "Kepler-16b" To see a video which relates to this discovery please click on the following link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/video/2011/sep/15/kepler16b-planet .
These lucky astronomers! Image how they must have felt when they discovered Kepler-16b had two suns!!
Here is a link to a NASA article about the discovery! This article contains photos and videos about this discovery, Enjoy!! : http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/news/kepler-16b.html
Image above: An artist's impression of Kepler-16b.
Source of image:Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt
To see a larger image of the planet please click on the following link:
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/587834main_Kepler16_transit_art2_946-710.jpg
To learn where Kepler-16b is located in the sky please visit the following website:
http://www.allthesky.com/constellations/cygnus/
