14 DAY TRIAL // A group of astronomers including investigators from the Carnegie Institution for Science (CIS), in Washington, DC, announces the discovery of the first extrasolar planet found orbiting around a binary star system. The two stars are located very close to each other.
From the surface of the newly-discovered planet, called Kepler-16b, potential inhabitants will see two suns rising in the morning sky, like in the iconic image of Tatooine in the Star Wars franchise. Experts always knew that it was just a matter of time before such an object was actually discovered.
Astronomers have dubbed this object a circumbinary planet, a name that describes the way it moves around a binary system. As its name implies, the planet was discovered using the NASA Kepler Telescope, which is designed specifically to hunt for exoplanets.
CIS astrophysicist and research team member Alan Boss says that it would be very interesting to calculate how Earth would look and behave like in such a system. The expert also provides an informed account of what conditions of Kepler-16b might look like.
To kick things off, he says, the planet is most likely a “little frosty. Though it is closer to its stars than Earth is to the Sun, the stars aren't quite so bright, so the temperature of this planet would only be about 200 Kelvin.” That is the equivalent of about minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit (-73ºCelsius).
“If you replaced our sun with those stars, we would be even colder than 200 Kelvin, because we're farther out than this Tatooine-like planet,” the investigator adds, saying that life would most likely not have developed here in these circumstances.
Earth orbiting a binary system “is not a habitable planet – unless you had an advanced life form that originated elsewhere that could keep itself warm,” he explains. The host stars – weighing 20 percent and 70 percent of a single solar mass each – would not provide sufficient heat.
Still, their combined mass would make up for about 90 percent of the Sun's current gravitational pull, which means that our planet's days and years would not change by such a wide margin. The critical factor in determining this would be determining whether the Moon formed at all.
“We don't really have a good feeling of how a planet would form around these two stars. Theorists don't really know how that would happen. But now we know that the answer is yes, it can happen,” Boss explains, quoted by Space.
Experts know that planets form from the protoplanetary disk that develops around a star immediately after the object forms. Clumps in the disk eventually come together to form rocks, asteroids, and eventually planets. How such a disk survives in a binary system is a mystery for now.