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posted by janrinok on Friday July 17 2015, @01:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the using-the-force dept.

Sibling suns – made famous in the "Star Wars" scene where Luke Skywalker gazes toward a double sunset – and the planets around them may be more common than we've thought, and Cornell astronomers are presenting new ideas on how to find them.

Astronomers could discover a plethora of planets around binary star systems (stars that rotate around each other) by measuring with high precision how stars move around each other, looking for disturbances exerted by possible exoplanets. So explains new research, "Survival of Planets Around Shrinking Stellar Binaries," published in the Proceedings of the National Academy Sciences, July 9, by Diego J. Munoz, Cornell postdoctoral researcher, and Dong Lai, professor of astronomy, in the College of Arts and Sciences.

NASA's Kepler telescope is a heliocentric (it orbits the sun) spacecraft that monitors star brightness in a Milky Way region near the constellation Cygnus, the swan. Measuring photons, Kepler detects lower light values – and thus, a planetary transit.

Munoz explains that suns in the close binary system likely were once standard systems that have lost energy and shrunk, bringing the suns closer together. As the sibling sun's distance decreases, the orbits of that system's planets become misaligned, rendering it impossible for the Kepler telescope to detect planets – which no longer cross in the front of the suns.

Munoz and Lai suggest scouting for exoplanet-caused disturbances for compact binary star systems, to determine a new population of circumbinary planets. Said Munoz: "Since this type of 'compact' binary is very common, it had been very puzzling that no planets had been detected."


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 17 2015, @07:49PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 17 2015, @07:49PM (#210560)

    Exotic System Of "Quintuplet" Stars All Orbiting Each Other Discovered [techtimes.com]

    two binary star pairs and a lone fifth star are all gravitationally bound together

    this type of 'compact' binary is very common

    While astronomers say around a third of the stars in the universe are in pairs or inhabit multiple systems, five stars is a single system is rare
    [...]
    The two binary pairs are about 13 billion miles apart, about the distance of Pluto's orbit around our sun.

    -- gewg_