Scientists Discover a Giant Planet that Orbits Two Suns

SCIENTISTS DISCOVER A GIANT PLANET THAT ORBITS TWO SUNS

An artist's impression of the simultaneous stellar eclipse and planetary transit events on Kepler-1647 b. Such a double eclipse event is known as a syzygy. (Lynette Cook)


"Some worlds have more than one sun in their sky. Now scientists say they've confirmed the existence of the largest-ever planet orbiting a pair of binary stars – a gas giant with the same mass and radius as Jupiter. Exoplanets like this one – situated in their stars' habitable zone and massive enough to lasso in many rocky moons – could be an interesting place to go looking for signs of alien life.

"The newly confirmed behemoth has been dubbed Kepler-1647 b, and it sits 3,700 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. At an estimated 4.4 billion years old, it's roughly the same age as Earth. But it's nothing like our home planet. It's what is known as a circumbinary world – one that orbits two suns that dance together as a binary pair – and it's the size of Jupiter, a planet with a diameter more than 11 times that of Earth's. Its suns are pretty similar to our own (one is slightly smaller and the other slightly larger) but, well, there are two of them.

"The first transit was detected way back in 2011, but with one transit it's hard or impossible to tell what's going on,” […] "So we had to wait for three years for the planet to transit again, during which time we kept a close eye in the system, analyzing the available data and gathering new observations.”

"Habitability aside, Kepler-1647 b is important because it is the tip of the iceberg of a theoretically predicted population of large, long-period circumbinary planets," study co-author William Welsh of San Diego State University said in a statement:

"New planet is largest discovered that orbits 2 suns –  Kepler-1647 b is the largest planet, both in size and orbit, of any circumbinary planet discovered so far (SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY) EUREKALERT

SAN DIEGO (June 13, 2016) – If you cast your eyes toward the constellation Cygnus, you'll be looking in the direction of the largest planet yet discovered around a double-star system. It's too faint to see with the naked eye, but a team led by astronomers from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and San Diego State University used the Kepler Space Telescope to identify the new planet, Kepler-1647 b. The discovery was announced today in San Diego, at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. [… ]  

"It's a bit curious that this biggest planet took so long to confirm, since it is easier to find big planets than small ones," said SDSU astronomer Jerome Orosz, another coauthor on the study. "It took so long to confirm because its orbital period is so long."

Sounds like a Nibiru orbital to me?