NASA probe discovers new planet orbiting two stars

NASA had announced that they are looking at several candidate planets in the habitable zone when scientists made public the discovery.

The search for planets that could support Earth-like life forms is heating up and now a pair of researchers are claiming to have identified a new way to speed up the process.

That, said Professor Jerome Orosz is a near-perfect representation of what it would look like if you were standing on a planet in a binary star system.

John Grunsfeld, the associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at the NASA headquarters in Washington, reported that “On the 20th anniversary year of the discovery that proved other suns host planets, the Kepler exoplanet explorer has discovered a planet and star which most closely resemble the Earth and our Sun”. The planet was hard to spot because the tilt of its orbit rapidly changes, making transits – passages in front of a star -visible only 9 percent of the time. The discovery marks an important milestone and comes only four years after the first Kepler circumbinary planet was detected.

Any inhabitants of the system would see two suns in their sky – much like the view from the planet Tatooine in the movie “Star Wars” – orbiting each other every 27 days. This is probably not enough time for complex life to evolve so any life on an exomoon is likely very simple and single cellular.

“We calculated that the planetary transits are only visible from Earth nine percent of the time, which means (for similar systems) there around 11.5 systems that are not showing signs of transits during the course of Kepler observations”, he told redOrbit. The mass of the planet was not measurable with the current data, but is likely to be less than 16 times that of the Earth. They are looking for celestial bodies orbiting alien stars at just the right distance – not close enough causing the heat of the star to boil the oceans, but not as far away as to ensure a frozen planet. The two stars in this system are of different sizes. The newly discovered planet is also 5 percent further from its star than our Earth is from our Sunday. The systems tend to be very compact and they come in a wide range of configurations. “Each new circumbinary planet is a gem, revealing something unexpected and challenging”. So far, Kepler has identified over 1000 planets that hover within the “goldilocks zone”, writes Nature World News. The “dips” Orosz was referring to are dips in light, indicating a planet passing through.

The Kepler space telescope continues to find transiting exoplanets throughout our galaxy.

Scientists utilizing NASA’s highly effective Kepler telescope have discovered a planet past the photo voltaic system that may be a shut match to Earth.