Sunday, January 15

Kepler-16b: Exoplanet With Two Sunsets

Imagine standing on a planet where you can watch two sunsets. Kepler 16b is such a world where this phenomenon occurs. It was discovered in 2011 using data from NASA’s Kepler Spacecraft. Astronomers used the transit method to discover this circumbinary planet- planet orbiting two stars. This planet is cold, gaseous, partly composed of rock and is located 200 light years from the Earth. It is about the size of Saturn and represents the vast variety of exoplanets in our galaxy. Also, it was the first planet discovered orbiting two stars that are in a binary system. It lies outside the habitable zone of the two stars and takes 229 Earth days to complete one orbit. The stars it orbits are smaller than our Sun. One is 60% the mass of the Sun and the other only 20%.