It’s already a big week for extra-solar planets, as seen in the coverage (previous post) of 50 new planets discovered by a European Southern Observatory team including one so-called Goldilocks candidate. Today finds many of the same reporters describing discovery of a real-life Tatooine world, a planet following a wide orbit roundabout two stars more or less like Luke Skywalker’s home in the original Star Wars movie.. This one’s evidence is in data from the Kepler space telescope, whose operators infer partners of stars by looking for things that block or enhance the star’s light – as when lined up like in that artist’s painting. Plus, this week saw news of a planet that is inferred only because other planets in its system are getting off-rhythm (shades of the discovery of Neptune in the mid-19th century), and another news quiver on implication of a planet so blasted by its star’s X-rays that it is losing millions of tons of matter per second, ousted from its atmosphere.
1) Double-sun planet stories: Lots of these, thanks to a well-publicized NASA-Ames teleconference and publication in Science magazine. Planet Kepler 16b is Saturn-sized, so nobody is there driving around in levitating scooters. Most stories focus on the Tatooine, two-sun angle, naturally. Unreported in anything I saw is something else important – Kepler has now been going long enough to pick up planets with Earth-sized orbits. This one goes around its two hosts every 229 days. The first bunch of Kepler planets were hot worlds whizzing around their stars every few days or weeks.
- Space.com – Charles Q. Choi: Planet Like ‘Star Wars’ Tatooine Discovered Orbiting 2 Suns ;
- Nat’l Geographic News – Andrew Fazekas: New Saturn-like Planet Has Two Suns, NASA Says ;
- NYTimes – Dennis Overbye: NASA Detects Planet Dancing With a Pair of Stars ; Leave it to Overbye to dive right in (after wading through Star Wars references) to some of the new science here. Such as the surprising stability of the orbit so close to two stars. And the payoff from such a triply-transiting system in the form of unpredented measurement of their orbital parameters, masses, sizes, etc. That, and the happenstance that such a three-way dance is visible to Kepler at all, right now.
- ABC – Ned Potter: Like Tatooine in ‘Star Wars,’ Planet Found With Two Suns ; Not a bad job at all, especially for a prime time network news operation.
- Guardian (UK) Ian Sample: ‘Star Wars’ planet discovered with two suns ; Explains the sequence of discovery that led to the conclusion.
- MSNBC Cosmic Log – Alan Boyle : Real-life ‘Star Wars’ planet seen ; Boyle brings up an intriguing idea – maybe this planet has moons, and they could really be a lot like Tatooine. Only a lot colder. For once we have an extrasolar gas giant that is outside the habitability zone, not inside in the realm of hot Jupiters.
- PostMedia News via Montreal Gazette – Bradley Bouzane: Star Wars-like planet discovered with two suns ;
- AFP – US Astronomers find planet with two Suns ;
*UPDATES – Plenty of outlets didn’t get their stories out till this morning, the Science issue’s date. Some I just missed:
- SF Chronicle – David Perlman: Real planet ‘Tatooine’ with two suns ; Perlman gets decent length for a review of how Kepler works, such details as the colors of these suns (orange and deep red), and a source’s nice quote: “Head-spinning carousel of a planetary system.”
- Washington Post – Brian Vastag: From “Star Wars’ to reality: Astronomers discover Tatooine world with two suns.
- Christian Science Monitor – Pete Spotts: Tatooine for real? Scientists confirm planet orbiting two suns ; One source ponders the possibility of planets a lot closer to us than this one – around the double star system Alpha Centauri.
- TIME Magazine – Michael D. Lemonick: Scientists Find a Star Wars World:One Planet, Two Suns ; Nicely put: “When two elephants are waltzing, it could be very difficult for mice to tiptoe safely under their feet.” Also a good capture of the sequence of surprises for the researchers as they studied the system.
- Bloomberg/Business Week – Robert Langreth: ‘Star Wars’ Gets Real as Scientists Find Planet With Two Suns ;
- Wall St. Journal – Robert Lee Hotz: Week Brings Hail of Planets /Seventy-Four Discoveries Include One with Two Suns; Global Team Vie for Finds ; Lee, as does this post, pulls recent planet news into one package, one he calls “a growing inventory of alien worlds in the curiosity shop of the cosmos.” But he bothered to tot up the numbers on the week’s haul, good on him for doing it. And he reached back farther than a week for examples of this bulging larder.
- USA Today – Dan Vergano: Kepler spots world with two suns ; Some other accounts hint there are more of these double-star worlds. Vergano relays word that sturdy Dutch reporter Govert Schilling filed from a meeting in Wyoming that the Kepler team is polishing up the data on three more.
- Sky & Telescope – Shweta Krishnan: A Planet Orbiting Two Suns : This is for you if you like your light curves explained in plain English. It’s technical, without being full geek. That diagram next to the first update is from this article.
Grist for the Mill: SETI Institute Press Release; Carnegie Institution Press Release ;NASA Ames Press Release ; UC Santa Barbara Press Release ;
2) Invisible Planet Stories: They’re all invisible, pretty much. This one however is inferred only because another (invisible in a literal sense) planet has back-and-forth variations in its orbit, a sure sign that another planet’s gravity is giving it a rhythmic tug.
- Astronomy Now Online – Keith Cooper: Kepler leaves unseen exoplanet nowhere to hide ;
- Time Mag – Michael D. Lemonick: Hidden Worlds: Astronomers Find Invisible Planet 650 Light-Years Away ;
- Space.com – Mike Wall: ‘Invisible’ planet discovered with new technique ;
Grist for the Mill: NASA-Ames Press Release ;
3) X-ray Roasted Planet Stories: This from discovery with the French CoRoT transit mission, and followup with other instruments inlcuding the Chandra X-ray Observatory. .
- Universe Today – Tammy Plotner: Stellar X-Rays Strip Planet To Bare Bones ;
- The Weather Space.com – Richard McMillan: Study shows star beating the living tar out of nearby planet with x-rays ; This is a minor effort, sadly lacking in any useful detail. But worth listing if only for the enthusiastic headline.
- Nat’l Geographic News – Victoria Jaggard: NASA Finds “Death Star” Blasting Planet With X-Rays ; Ah, yet another Star Wars allusion.
Grist for the Mill: NASA/Chandra Press Release ;
By the way, I could have done the next post down based on these planet stories. For each of the legit outlets that did some semblance of reporting – that is, performed journalism – there were several from services that routinely swallow press releases with one orifice and excrete them from another, not always in a form of any use to anybody, not even as fertilizer.
– Charlie Petit
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