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Thread: Planet found in a binary star system

  1. #1
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    Close twin star system reveals a planet

    More planets than we thought!
    Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

  2. #2
    Interesting. I really wounldn't have expected to find a planet in a close binary system. But they didn't mention how close the planet was to it's star. A Jupiter size planet probably wouldn't harbor life, but a big moon around it might if the orbit of the planet was the right distance from the star.

  3. #3
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    According to this site:

    http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/planets/gamma-Ceph.html

    Minimum mass = 1.76x Jupiter
    Semi-major axis: ~ 2.1 AU
    Orbital period: 903 ± 6 d.
    Eccentricity: 0.2 ± 0.07

    The central star is a K1 subgiant with 1.6 times the mass of the Sun and 8.2 times the luminosity. It is approximately 3 billion years old and as a main sequence star it was probably an A7 with a luminosity of 10-11 times that of the Sun.

  4. #4
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    The error bars on the period of the planet's orbit, and that of the star's orbit, are too large to probably say one way or the other, but I wonder if there is a synchronism between the orbital periods? (like there is between many objects in our solar system).

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