Wand, 20 июня 2016 г., 8:31
If you cast your eyes toward the constellation Cygnus, you will be looking in the direction of the largest planet yet discovered around a double-star system. It is too faint to see with the naked eye, but a team led by astronomers from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland and San Diego State University (SDSU) in California, used NASA's Kepler Space Telescope to identify the new planet, Kepler-1647b. Kepler-1647 is 3,700 light-years away and approximately 4.4 billion years old, roughly the same age as Earth. The stars are similar to the sun, with one slightly larger than our home star and the other slightly smaller. The planet has a mass and radius nearly identical to that of Jupiter, making it the largest transiting circumbinary planet ever found. (Photo not found) *This is a comparison of the relative sizes of several Kepler circumbinary planets. Kepler-1647 b is substantially larger than any of the previously known circumbinary planets.* The planet takes 1,107 days (just over 3 years) to orbit its host stars, the longest period of any confirmed transiting exoplanet found so far. The planet is also much further away from its stars than any other circumbinary planet, breaking with the tendency for circumbinary planets to have close-in orbits. Interestingly, its orbit puts the planet within the so-called habitable zone-the range of distances from a star where liquid water might pool on the surface of an orbiting planet. (Photo not found) Like Jupiter, however, Kepler-1647b is a gas giant, making the planet unlikely to host life. Yet if the planet has large moons, they could potentially be suitable for life. Once a candidate planet is found, researchers employ advanced computer programs to determine if it really is a planet. It can be a grueling process. Laurance Doyle, a coauthor on the paper and astronomer at the SETI Institute, noticed a transit back in 2011. But more data and several years of analysis were needed to confirm the transit was indeed caused by a circumbinary planet. A network of amateur astronomers in the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope 'Follow-Up Network' provided additional observations that helped the researchers estimate the planet's mass. Source: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160613144341.htm
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