It’s been a busy couple of weeks for exoplanetary discoveries, but also for me, which explains why I’ve taken so long getting round to writing about them.
On the 28th of August, the Kepler mission announced the discovery of a unique binary star two planet system. The Kepler 47 family consists of a binary pair, a G-type star – about 84% as massive as the Sun, and a smaller M-type red dwarf roughly 36% of the Sun’s mass, but only 1.4% as luminous. Two planets have been observed to be orbiting the pair. The closest is of these is Kepler 47 (AB) b, estimated (from mass-radius relationships) to be between 7 and 10 Earth masses, but the error on this figure remains large. The outermost planet, Kepler 47 (AB) c, is Neptune-sized (16 – 23 Earth masses) and is orbiting within the habitable zone, although due to its large mass it is unlikely to fulfil the traditional requirements for planetary habitability. The configuration of the Kepler 47 system illustrates the fact that stable multi-planetary orbits can exist around binary stars, and brings the total of circumbinary planets to six.
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