Researchers determine physical conditions of two exoplanets in Kepler-36 system

(Phys.org)—Located about 1,530 light years from the Earth in the constellation of Cygnus, Kepler-36 is a sun-like star orbited by two known alien worlds. The inner planet, designated Kepler-36b is a so-called "super-Earth," as it is larger than our home planet but smaller than Neptune; the larger Kepler-36c, resembling the solar system's outermost planet, is described as a "mini-Neptune." What is unusual about this planetary system is that these two exoworlds have very close orbits, separated only by 0.013 astronomical units (AU)—five times the Earth-moon distance. In a new research paper published online on Feb. 9, Princeton scientists are trying to determine physical conditions and understand the evolution process of this curious, distant system.

http://phys.org/news/2016-02-physical-conditions-exoplanets-kepler-.html

Interesting.

---

Half Lava & Half Rock, 5 Cancri E Might Be The Weirdest Exoplanet Ever Discovered

Nearly 2,000 planets have been discovered outside our solar system, but this just might be the strangest one yet.

A lava-loaded “super earth” called 55 Cancri e is twice the size of our own planet but eight times as dense. And it’s so close to its star that a year lasts only 18 hours.

Just 40 light years away, 55 Cancri e may also be tidally locked to its sun the way the moon is to Earth. One side would be a blazing hot eternal night with temperatures of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the other an even hotter permanent day, according to a heat map of the planet published in the journal Nature that used data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/lava-planet-55-cancri-e_us_56fc9d80e4b0daf53aeebb92

---

Half Lava & Half Rock, 5 Cancri E Might Be The Weirdest Exoplanet Ever Discovered

Nearly 2,000 planets have been discovered outside our solar system, but this just might be the strangest one yet.

A lava-loaded “super earth” called 55 Cancri e is twice the size of our own planet but eight times as dense. And it’s so close to its star that a year lasts only 18 hours.

Just 40 light years away, 55 Cancri e may also be tidally locked to its sun the way the moon is to Earth. One side would be a blazing hot eternal night with temperatures of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the other an even hotter permanent day, according to a heat map of the planet published in the journal Nature that used data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/lava-planet-55-cancri-e_us_56fc9d80e4b0daf53aeebb92

So, they finally found Crematoria!
;)

---

non-profit org. Play4Life in Zagreb, Croatia, EU

I like this system.

It turns out this planet has three suns in its sky

Scientists have found a rare three-star system 685 light years away. Instead of the more typical single star, or even a pair, it boasts a trio of suns that coexist in a complex dance. And the system is rare even among the triple-threat crowd: It hosts a stable planet, which is something scientists have seen only three times before.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/04/04/it-turns-out-this-planet-has-three-suns-in-its-sky/

---

I like this system.

It turns out this planet has three suns in its sky

Scientists have found a rare three-star system 685 light years away. Instead of the more typical single star, or even a pair, it boasts a trio of suns that coexist in a complex dance. And the system is rare even among the triple-threat crowd: It hosts a stable planet, which is something scientists have seen only three times before.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/04/04/it-turns-out-this-planet-has-three-suns-in-its-sky/

Man I'd love to enjoy a view from there...
;)

---

non-profit org. Play4Life in Zagreb, Croatia, EU

I like this system.

It turns out this planet has three suns in its sky

Scientists have found a rare three-star system 685 light years away. Instead of the more typical single star, or even a pair, it boasts a trio of suns that coexist in a complex dance. And the system is rare even among the triple-threat crowd: It hosts a stable planet, which is something scientists have seen only three times before.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/04/04/it-turns-out-this-planet-has-three-suns-in-its-sky/

Man I'd love to enjoy a view from there...
;)

Same here!

---

rOZZ
Music
Pictures

It's hard to imagine a stable, nearly circular orbit with a three-body system.

Ahh, got it - the planet orbits one of the stars, with the other two stars sort of orbiting the first star as a binary pair.

Not too much of a sun rise from the binary pair, but given the proximity to its star the "surface" will be pretty hot....

---

Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

It has come to my attention planet K2 18b might be able to sustain life, don't ask me why.

---

rOZZ
Music
Pictures

It has come to my attention planet K2 18b might be able to sustain life, don't ask me why.

If it's life Jim, its not as we know it (Slightly revised for this post)

From what I can tell is quite large, almost Neptune size. The possibility of it being a water world is quite good though and it seems that where there is water there is possibility of life. It looks like the temp of the planet is around the freezing point , -1C (30F). At 111 LY maybe the JWT can glean more information on this planet. Time will tell.

Bob

---

Sometimes I wonder, what happened to all the people I gave directions to?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
SETI@home classic workunits 4,321
SETI@home classic CPU time 22,169 hours

a well built android could survive just about everywhere. though arguable if that can be considered life. perhaps a biological brain with everything else android

a well built android could survive just about everywhere. though arguable if that can be considered life. perhaps a biological brain with everything else android

Something living had to have built it or it's predecessor.

---

Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

It has come to my attention planet K2 18b might be able to sustain life, don't ask me why.

If it's life Jim, its not as we know it (Slightly revised for this post)

From what I can tell is quite large, almost Neptune size. The possibility of it being a water world is quite good though and it seems that where there is water there is possibility of life. It looks like the temp of the planet is around the freezing point , -1C (30F). At 111 LY maybe the JWT can glean more information on this planet. Time will tell.

Bob

you're right...it might be with water or gas surface:
http://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog
;)

---

non-profit org. Play4Life in Zagreb, Croatia, EU

It has come to my attention planet K2 18b might be able to sustain life, don't ask me why.

If it's life Jim, its not as we know it (Slightly revised for this post)

From what I can tell is quite large, almost Neptune size. The possibility of it being a water world is quite good though and it seems that where there is water there is possibility of life. It looks like the temp of the planet is around the freezing point , -1C (30F). At 111 LY maybe the JWT can glean more information on this planet. Time will tell.

Bob

Water and amino acids, the building blocks of life..

---

rOZZ
Music
Pictures

Astronomers Have Found Planets in the Habitable Zone of a Nearby Star

The robot telescope settles on its target, a star that sits closer than all but a tiny fraction of the tens of billions of stellar systems that make up the Milky Way. Its mirror grabs light for 55 seconds, again and again. The robot telescope—called TRAPPIST—will observe the star for 245 hours across sixty-two nights, making 12,295 measurements. Eleven times, it will see the star dim, ever so slightly. This dip in luminosity, called a transit, has a straightforward astronomical explanation: It’s a planet passing in front of the star, blocking just a bit of its light. In this case, the transits tell us that 3 planets orbit the star.

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/05/astronomers-have-found-planets-in-the-habitable-zone/480690/

---

Astronomers Have Found Planets in the Habitable Zone of a Nearby Star

The robot telescope settles on its target, a star that sits closer than all but a tiny fraction of the tens of billions of stellar systems that make up the Milky Way. Its mirror grabs light for 55 seconds, again and again. The robot telescope—called TRAPPIST—will observe the star for 245 hours across sixty-two nights, making 12,295 measurements. Eleven times, it will see the star dim, ever so slightly. This dip in luminosity, called a transit, has a straightforward astronomical explanation: It’s a planet passing in front of the star, blocking just a bit of its light. In this case, the transits tell us that 3 planets orbit the star.

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/05/astronomers-have-found-planets-in-the-habitable-zone/480690/

Funny name for a telescope :D

---

rOZZ
Music
Pictures

planet to far away.

New Planet Is Largest Discovered That Orbits Two Suns

If you cast your eyes toward the constellation Cygnus, you’ll be looking in the direction of the largest planet yet discovered around a double-star system. It’s too faint to see with the naked eye, but a team led by astronomers from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and San Diego State University (SDSU) in California, used NASA's Kepler Space Telescope to identify the new planet, Kepler-1647b.

http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/new-planet-is-largest-discovered-that-orbits-two-suns

---

‘Infant’ Alien Planet Discovery Shakes Up Ideas About How Worlds Form

Astronomers have found what they say is the youngest fully formed exoplanet ever seen, and it’s shaking up ideas about how planets form.

“This discovery is a remarkable milestone in exoplanet science,” Erik Petigura, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech in Pasadena, California, and coauthor of a paper about the finding, said in a written statement. The discovery, he said, could help explain the origins of Earth “and eventually the origin of life.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/discovery-of-infant-exoplanet-may-help-explain-origin-of-life_us_576ab7b5e4b065534f487837?section=

exciting.

---

Three Suns.

Newly discovered planet has 3 suns

If you thought Luke Skywalker's home planet, Tatooine, was a strange world with its two suns in the sky, imagine this: a planet where you'd either experience constant daylight or enjoy triple sunrises and sunsets each day, depending on the seasons, which happen to last longer than human lifetimes.

Such a world has been discovered by a team of astronomers led by the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona, using direct imaging. The planet, HD 131399Ab, is unlike any other known world - on by far the widest known orbit within a multi-star system. The discovery will be published online by the journal Science on Thursday, 7 July, 2016.

http://phys.org/news/2016-07-newly-planet-suns.html

---

NASA’s Kepler Confirms 100+ Exoplanets During Its K2 Mission


An international team of astronomers has discovered and confirmed a treasure trove of new worlds using NASA’s Kepler spacecraft on its K2 mission. Among the findings tallying 197 initial planet candidates, scientists have confirmed 104 planets outside our solar system. Among the confirmed is a planetary system comprising four promising planets that could be rocky.

The planets, all between 20 and 50 percent larger than Earth by diameter, are orbiting the M dwarf star K2-72, found 181 light years away in the direction of the Aquarius constellation. The host star is less than half the size of the sun and less bright. The planets’ orbital periods range from five and a half to 24 days, and two of them may experience irradiation levels from their star comparable to those on Earth. Despite their tight orbits — closer than Mercury's orbit around the sun — the possibility that life could arise on a planet around such a star cannot be ruled out, according to lead author Crossfield, a Sagan Fellow at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.

http://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/kepler/nasa-s-kepler-confirms-100-exoplanets-during-its-k2-mission

Update.

---