A New Solar System

Chris shared some news on facebook yesterday about recently discovery of two new solar systems. I thought it was interesting enough to read a little more about it and make a post on it here.

One of these new systems, is Kepler-9, which has been studied by Matthews Holman at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and his colleagues from different institutes. They published their paper in Science on August 26.

This new system has two Saturn-size planets, which they called them Kepler-9B and Kepler-9C, and there is a possibility of observing a third smaller planet with a radius of 1.5 times the Earth's radius.

This discovery has been made by Kepler, Nasa's first mission capable of finding Earth-size and smaller planets around other stars.

Below, you can read the abstract of this new Science online published paper.

"The Kepler spacecraft is monitoring over 150,000 stars for evidence of planets transiting those stars. We report the detection, based on 7 months of Kepler observations, of two Saturn-size planets that transit the same Sun-like star. Their 19.2- and 38.9-day periods are presently increasing and decreasing at respective average rates of 4 and 39 min per orbit, and in addition the transit times of the inner body display an alternating variation of smaller amplitude. These signatures are characteristic of gravitational interaction of two planets near a 2:1 orbital resonance. Six radial velocity observations show that these two planets are the most massive objects orbiting close to the star and substantially improve the estimates of their masses. After removing the signal of the two confirmed giant planets, we identify an additional transiting super-Earth-size planet candidate with a period of 1.6 days."