Information Madness

An international team through NASA’s Kepler Spacecraft has made a finding that there is a planet; they are calling Kepler – 16 B, which orbits two suns. This planet is about two hundred light years away from Earth and it is a frozen world of gas and rock. It is about the size of Saturn and evokes memories of the fictional planet, `Tatooine’, from the `Star Wars’ saga.

The team says that the planet is orbiting two suns that are circling each other. One sun is about two- thirds the size of our sun and the other one is about a fifth the size of our sun. Each orbit takes 229 days and the suns eclipse each other every forty one days. The daylight on the planet is not constant because the two suns are quite close to each other.

The team has spotted this planet after observing unusual signals in the data collected by the Kepler Spacecraft. Images that have been captured by Kepler’s camera have showed the two suns orbiting each other and producing eclipses as they moved in front of one another. The findings have been ascertained from the ground-based telescope at the Whipple Observatory in Arizona.

The shifting velocity of the planet as it moved around in its orbit has been monitored from the Whipple Observatory. Kepler 16 B is now the first confirmed circumbinary planet that is orbiting two suns. The learning process of our solar system is an ongoing one which never ceases to amaze us.