|Play ScienceCast Video||Join Mailing List| Sept. 12, 2012: News
flash: The Milky Way galaxy just got a little weirder. Back in
2011 astronomers were amazed when NASA's Kepler spacecraft
discovered a planet orbiting a double star system. Such a world,
they realized, would have double sunsets and sunrises just like
the fictional planet Tatooine in the movie Star Wars. Yet this
planet was real. Now Kepler has discovered a whole system of
planets orbiting a double star. The star system, known as
Kepler-47, is located 4,900 light-years from Earth in the
constellation Cygnus. Two stars orbit one another at the center
of the system: One is similar to the sun in size, but only 84
percent as bright. The second star is smaller, only one-third
the size of the sun and less than 1 percent as bright. Kepler
found two planets orbiting this mismatched pair. "The presence
of a full-fledged planetary system orbiting Kepler-47 is an
amazing discovery," says Greg Laughlin, professor of
Astrophysics and Planetary Science at the