Author: Mike Wall / Source: Space.com
(Image: © NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle)
The only known multiplanet “Tatooine” system just got even more interesting.
A third world lurks in the two-star Kepler-47 system, and it’s bigger than its two previously discovered siblings, a new study reports.
“We certainly didn’t expect it to be the largest planet in the system,” study co-author William Welsh, an astronomer at San Diego State University (SDSU), said in a statement. “This was almost shocking.”
Kepler-47 is a roughly 3.5-billion-year-old system located 3,340 light-years from Earth. One of its stars is quite sunlike, but the other is considerably smaller, harboring just one-third the mass of our sun. The two stars orbit their common center of mass once every 7.45 Earth days.
Back in 2012, Welsh and his colleagues, led by fellow SDSU astronomer Jerome Orosz, announced the discovery of two planets circling the two stars. These worlds, Kepler-47b and Kepler-47c, both have two suns in their skies, just like Luke Skywalker’s home planet of Tatooine in the “Star Wars” universe.
The researchers made the discovery using the most prolific planet hunter of all time, NASA’s Kepler space telescope. Kepler, which was declared dead this past fall, found alien worlds by the “transit method,” noting the tiny brightness dips caused when planets cross their host stars’ faces.
Just before that 2012 paper was published, the team saw a hint of a third transit signal in Kepler’s dataset, said Orosz, who also led the new study. Six months later, Kepler witnessed another transit, and the researchers were able to get a preliminary orbit for the candidate
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