kosmos: Kepler-16b

Evidence: 100 • authority: 72

Kepler-16b (formally Kepler-16 (AB)-b) is a Saturn-sized exoplanet consisting of half gas and half rock and ice. It orbits a binary star, Kepler-16, with a period of 229 days. "It is the first confirmed, unambiguous example of a circumbinary planet – a planet orbiting not one, but two stars," said Josh Carter of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, one of the discovery team. Kepler-16b is also unusual in that it falls inside the radius that was thought to be the inner limit for planet formation in a binary star system. According to Sara Seager, a planetary expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it was thought that for a planet to have a stable orbit around such…

Evidence: 67 • authority: 72

The Kepler space telescope was a space telescope launched by NASA in 2009 to discover Earth-sized planets orbiting other stars. Named after astronomer Johannes Kepler (who, ironically, was convinced that planetary systems did not exist around any of the stars) the spacecraft was launched into an Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit. The principal investigator was William J. Borucki. After nine and a half years of operation, the telescope's reaction control system fuel was depleted, and NASA announced its retirement on October 30, 2018. Designed to survey a portion of Earth's region of the Milky Way to discover Earth-size exoplanets in or near habitable zones and to estimate how many of the bil…

Evidence: 51 • authority: 72

Kepler-16 is an eclipsing binary star system in the constellation of Cygnus that was targeted by the Kepler spacecraft. Both stars are smaller than the Sun; the primary, Kepler-16A, is a K-type main-sequence star and the secondary, Kepler-16B, is an M-type red dwarf star. They are separated by 0.23 AU, and complete an orbit around a common center of mass every 41 days. The system is host to one known exoplanet in circumbinary orbit: The Saturn-size planet Kepler-16b.

Evidence: 51 • authority: 80

The curiously circular orbit of Kepler-16b

Evidence: 51 • authority: 92

Evidence for a polar circumbinary exoplanet orbiting a pair of eclipsing brown dwarfs.. One notable example of exoplanet diversity is the population of circumbinary planets, which orbit around both stars of a binary star system. There are, so far, only 16 known circumbinary exoplanets, all of which lie in the same orbital plane as the host binary. Suggestions indicate that circumbinary planets could also exist on orbits highly inclined to the binary, close to 90°, polar orbits. No such planets have been found yet, but polar circumbinary gas and debris discs have been observed, and if these were to form planets, then those would be left on a polar orbit. We report strong evidence for a polar…

Evidence: 33 • authority: 72

Kepler-186 is a red dwarf star, located 177.5 parsecs (579 light years) away in the constellation of Cygnus. The star is slightly cooler than the Sun, with roughly half its metallicity. It is known to have five planets, including the first Earth-sized planet discovered in the habitable zone: Kepler-186f. The star hosts four other planets discovered so far, though they all orbit interior to the habitable zone. Within two first years of gathered data, the signals of four inner planetary candidates were found. Discussion of planets in the system was taking place in August and November 2013. In February 2014, those planets were confirmed through the "verification by multiplicity" method. The fi…