A team of researchers led by Bill Cochran of The University of Texas at Austin has used NASA's Kepler spacecraft to discover an unusual multiple-planet system containing a super-Earth and two Neptune-sized planets orbiting in resonance with each other.
They are announcing the find in Nantes, France at a joint meeting of the European Planetary Science Conference and the American Astronomical Society's Division of Planetary Science. The research will be published in a special Kepler issue of The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series in November.
Cochran's team is announcing three planets orbiting Kepler-18, a star similar to the Sun. Kepler 18 is just 10 percent larger than the Sun and contains 97 percent of the Sun's mass. It may host more planets than the three just announced.
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