More than half of Kepler’s giant exoplanets are false positives (Synopsis) [Starts With A Bang]

“After 20 years of exploring planets as big as Jupiter around other suns, we still have a lot of questions left open. For instance, we don’t understand what is the physical mechanism that forms Jupiter-like planets with orbital periods as little as a few days.” -Alexandre Santerne

By surveying an area of the sky containing over 150,000 stars visible to it, the Kepler satellite monitored each one over a multi-year period looking for periodic changes in brightness. Thousands of planetary candidates emerged via the transit method, where periodic dips of 3% or less were noted with regularity.

Image credit: William Borucki, Kepler Mission principal investigator, NASA / 2010.

However, a follow-up study has come out on the giant exoplanets, finding that over 50% of them aren’t giant planets after all, but wound up being eclipsing binary stars.

Image credit: Alexandre Santerne et al., 2015.

Go read the whole thing, and think about what it means. Perhaps our lone star Solar System is the oddity, after all.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1lbLJ2w

“After 20 years of exploring planets as big as Jupiter around other suns, we still have a lot of questions left open. For instance, we don’t understand what is the physical mechanism that forms Jupiter-like planets with orbital periods as little as a few days.” -Alexandre Santerne

By surveying an area of the sky containing over 150,000 stars visible to it, the Kepler satellite monitored each one over a multi-year period looking for periodic changes in brightness. Thousands of planetary candidates emerged via the transit method, where periodic dips of 3% or less were noted with regularity.

Image credit: William Borucki, Kepler Mission principal investigator, NASA / 2010.

However, a follow-up study has come out on the giant exoplanets, finding that over 50% of them aren’t giant planets after all, but wound up being eclipsing binary stars.

Image credit: Alexandre Santerne et al., 2015.

Go read the whole thing, and think about what it means. Perhaps our lone star Solar System is the oddity, after all.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1lbLJ2w