Sociotard Posted September 15, 2011 Report Share Posted September 15, 2011 Unlike Tatooine, it is a gas giant and is actually too cold for life (even if Kepler 16-b had a moon). Still cool. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njTxJbSVjFo Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tkdguy Posted September 16, 2011 Report Share Posted September 16, 2011 Re: Kepler 16-b has TWO suns Awesome find! Repped. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SSgt Baloo Posted September 16, 2011 Report Share Posted September 16, 2011 Re: Kepler 16-b has TWO suns ...and no daughters. Keep trying, Kepler 16-b. Keep trying. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Drhoz Posted September 16, 2011 Report Share Posted September 16, 2011 Re: Kepler 16-b has TWO suns I admit to momentary bewilderment when the advertisement claimed they could install a full solar system for you for $1990. Quite the bargain. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christopher Posted September 16, 2011 Report Share Posted September 16, 2011 Re: Kepler 16-b has TWO suns I admit to momentary bewilderment when the advertisement claimed they could install a full solar system for you for $1990. Quite the bargain. Well, the Star will surely burn a hole in their pocket.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted September 21, 2011 Report Share Posted September 21, 2011 Re: Kepler 16-b has TWO suns Finally read the tech paper on this. Both stars are less massive than the Sun, about 0.69 and 0.20 solar masses; both are main sequence stars. The more massive one (A) is a K star, rather like 61 Cygni A. The less massive one ( is an M star, and of the nearby "named" M dwarfs the one most similar looks to be Kruger 60 B. The planet ( has about 1/3 of a Jupiter mass. The planet orbit is only about 3 times the distance between the two stars. A scale diagram of the orbits is here (among other places). The orbits are to scale in that figure, but the star and planet sizes are not; the stars and planet are on a scale 20 times different (so they appear 20-fold too large relative to the orbits). The orbits are nearly (within 0.4 degrees) but not exactly coplanar. (For comparison, in our Solar System the planet orbits except for Mercury are within 2.2 degrees of the fundamental plane of the Solar System.) The orbital period of the planet around the center of mass is 229 days and the orbital size is 0.705 AU; the orbital period of the planets around each other is 41 days and the orbital size is 0.224 AU. The star orbits are eccentric (e ~= 0.159); the planet orbit is very close to circular. The planet's physical properties (as far as we know them) are pretty comparable to Saturn's. Nothing can be said about possible moons of the planet at this time. The system's distance from us is not well determined at this time but it's probably around 60 parsecs. I haven't found a conventional description of its apparent brightness but it is probably about apparent visual magnitude of +11 ... not visible to the unaided eye and you'd need a chart to identify it in a small telescope. The metallicity of the system is -0.3 on the conventional scale; this means it has less in the way of heavy elements than the Sun (and suggests the system is older than ours, but it's a weak suggestion) but it still belongs to the same general disk population of stars. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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