Astronomy Picture of the Day -- Kepler-16b: A Planet with Two Suns

NASA ^ | September 20, 2011 | (see photo credit)

[SunkenCiv]

Explanation: If you stay up long enough, you can watch both suns set. Such might be a common adage from beings floating in the atmosphere of Kepler 16b, a planet recently discovered by the space-based Kepler satellite. The above animated video shows how the planetary system might look to a visiting spaceship. Although multiple star systems are quite common, this is the first known to have a planet. Because our Earth is in the orbital plane of both stars and the planet, each body is seen to eclipse the others at different times, producing noticeable drop offs in the amount of light seen. The frequent eclipses have given Kepler 16b the most accurate mass and radius determination for a planet outside our Solar System. To find a planet like Saturn in an orbit like Venus -- so close to its binary star parents -- was a surprise and will surely become a focus of research.

[SunkenCiv]

Image taken from an earlier topic about this.

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Here's the original underlying YouTube link:

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[JoeProBono]

[Mike Darancette]

Looks like an old Analog cover.

[MadMax, the Grinning Reaper]

Wasn’t this the name of a TV show, “MY TWO SUNS”?

[lwoodham]

Lol, I am old enough to remember “My two sons

[ari-freedom]

[skeptoid]

Wasn’t this the name of a TV show, “MY TWO SUNS”?

My Three Sons

[Christian4Bush]

“The Force is strong with this one.”

[ixtl]

Just another example of how strange and wonderful (with empahsis on the wonderful) our universe is.

[cripplecreek]

[left that other site]

Get out the SPF 1000.

[Daffynition]

[JoeProBono]

[Conan the Librarian]

That video is the first thing that actually tells that the exo-planet orbits only one of the stars.

If the planet orbited both stars, did a figure 8 between the two stars, or orbited one of the stars and then they both orbited the other, that would be far more interesting to me.

As it is, this is just a bigger version of our Solar system, with Jupiter being replaced by the secondary star.

Important, but, not as cool as it could have been.

[TheOldLady]

It’s more like a planet in a solar system in which one of the other planets is a dwarf sun. That would be pretty dang cool, I think, especially if the video is true to life, and the second sun is far inside the planet’s orbit.

[bigheadfred]

Just daring me to pick you off out there, aren’t ya Joe?

[SunkenCiv]

LOL...