Tag: space-telescope

New discovery pushes star Kepler-90’s menagerie to eight planets

Enlarge / That’s a lot of mouths to feed. (credit: NASA/Wendy Stenzel ) If you have an emotional attachment to our Solar System’s distinctions, you may want to look away. We’ve found another star system with eight planets, tying our own mark. Oh, and a Google machine-learning algorithm is responsible for the discovery. This is one of two new exoplanets scraped from the massive archive of data from the Kepler space telescope by NASA’s Andrew Vanderburg and Christopher Shallue of the Google AI team. Planets detected by Kepler show up as slight dips in the brightness of a star—the result of the planet passing in front and blocking some of the light. Some planets are more obvious than others, and the goal here was to turn the algorithm loose on digging through past measurements for weak signals that had been missed. Like all machine learning systems, this one was fed measurements from previously identified exoplanets to work out what differentiates real signals from coincidental blips. The researchers say the system emerged with the ability to correctly identify false positives about 96 percent of the time. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New discovery pushes star Kepler-90’s menagerie to eight planets

Scientists find the largest known planet to orbit two stars

The notion of planets in a Tatooine -like system with two or more stars isn’t strange (they’ve been known since 1993), but a truly massive planet hasn’t been seen before… until now. Scientists using NASA’s Kepler space telescope have discovered Kepler-1647b, the largest known planet to orbit two stars (aka a circumbinary planet). The 4.4 billion year old gas giant is about as large as Jupiter, and orbits at a much further distance than other confirmed planets with a 1, 107-day trip. That’s still much closer than Jupiter, which takes 12 years, but it remains a rarity given our current knowledge. To no one’s surprise, researchers are doubtful that there’s any life to be found on Kepler-1647b; you won’t be visiting Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen any time soon. There’s a chance that any large moons around the planet might harbor organisms, though. And the discoverers are quick to note that this is just the “tip of the iceberg” for large, long-orbit circumbinary planets. Although the chances of finding a planet that supports life are very slim, there should be enough of these unusual star systems out there that the concept is plausible. Via: Space.com Source: NASA , ArXiv.org (PDF)

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Scientists find the largest known planet to orbit two stars