Imagine a world where the ‘Fear of the Dark’ song by Iron Maiden doesn’t have any meaning to you, as night doesn’t exist anymore. Although that’s a magnificent song that reveals the inner fear that many of us have, surely we would do fine without the presence of the night.
It sounds like a sci-fi scenario, but that’s exactly what inhabitants of the exoplanet known as Kepler-16b are likely going through if there are any. At 245 light-years away, the cosmic object revolves around two stars at once, according to SciTechDaily.com.
A new method of finding exoplanets
According to the same source, astronomers used a new technique, called the radial velocity method, to figure out the unusual state of the exoplanet. They knew before that the planet exists, however. Kepler-16b qualifies as a gas giant, and it’s about the same size as Saturn, the second-biggest planet from our Solar System. The planet revolves around not one, but two stars at the same time. The fact that the gas giant doesn’t possess a rocky structure is another reason to believe that there aren’t any aliens living there.
David Martin, who’s a co-author of the study, declared as SciTechDaily.com quotes:
It’s a confirmation that our method works,
And it creates an opportunity for us to apply this method now to identify other systems like this.
The new method works by analyzing the spectra of light that the stars produce.
Martin also said, as the same source mentioned above quotes:
What people had faced was that having two sets of spectra from two stars makes it really tricky, and people were struggling to get enough precision to see the wobble caused by the planet,
And we got around that by making a survey of systems with two stars that orbit each other where one star is big, and one is quite small.
The new study was published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.