17 September 2011

Seeing double... By Valentin & Martin from Sainte-Marie

It is not Tatooine, the planet in the Star Wars saga, but a real fact: NASA has found a planet orbiting two suns!
"Kepler-16b" is probably an uninhabitable cold gas giant like Saturn. Discovered by the Kepler telescope, launched in 2009, this planet is about two hundred light years away. The discovery is the first confirmation that a planet circling around two stars actually exists. The Kepler telescope proved the existence of the double sun thanks to an eclipse, when the orbiting planet passed in front of one of the two suns.
The discovery of this configuration demonstrates the variety of planetary systems within our galaxy. There are still many things to discover in our universe...

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