Kepler Mission Captures Planet With Two Suns (IMAGE)

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Kepler Mission Captures Planet With Two Suns

Caption

NASA's Kepler mission has discovered a world where two suns set over the horizon instead of just one. The planet, called Kepler-16b, is not thought to be habitable. It is a cold world, with a gaseous surface, and it circles two stars. The largest of the two stars, a K dwarf, is about 69 percent the mass of our sun, and the smallest, a red dwarf, is about 20 percent of the sun's mass. This image relates to an article that appeared in the Sept. 16, 2011, issue of Science, published by AAAS. The study, L.R. Doyle of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., and colleagues was titled, "Kepler-16: A Transiting Circumbinary Planet."

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[Image © NASA/JPL-Caltech]

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