University of Texas Students, Telescopes Help Discover Planets
Around Elderly Binary Star 21 October 2010 An international
consortium of astronomers, including undergraduate and graduate
students at The University of Texas at Austin, have discovered a
planetary system consisting of at least two massive Jupiter-like
planets orbiting the extremely close binary star system NN
Serpentis. The team used a wide variety of observations taken
over two decades from many telescopes, including two at The
University of Texas at Austin’s McDonald Observatory in West
Texas. The results are published online in the current edition
of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. Because of the
disturbing effects of a binary star system’s gravity,
astronomers normally do not expect to find planets in such
systems, but the research team was able to use the eclipses of
the stars as a precise clock whose irregularities could be used
to detect planets in orbit around the binary. The most massive
star at the center of the planetary system