Courses › The Universe from Scratch › Lesson 6
A planet with two suns · premieres Friday, October 30
In the movies there are planets with two suns in the sky. In 2011 a real one was discovered: Kepler-16 b. It was the first planet found orbiting two stars at once, thanks to eclipses.
The masses, sizes and orbits are the measured ones. But the starting positions are not the real ones: they were chosen so that an eclipse and a transit are visible in the animation. The planet's appearance is invented, and the light curve in this image is computed with the model — it is not Kepler's data.
| Figure | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery | 2011, first circumbinary planet found by transits | Doyle et al. 2011 (Science) |
| Stars | A: 0.6897 M☉; B: 0.20255 M☉ | Doyle et al. 2011 |
| Stellar orbit | 41.079 d; seen almost edge-on (90.34°) | Doyle et al. 2011 |
| Planet | 0.333 M♃ (0.313 per Triaud et al. 2022); 0.7538 R♃; 228.776 d | Doyle et al. 2011; Triaud et al. 2022 |
| Apparent size of star A from the planet | ≈0.49° (the Sun from Earth: 0.53°) | Computed by the template |
| Light from B versus A | ≈3.7% | Computed by the template (radius² × temperature⁴) |
| Light curve in the image | Synthetic, computed with the model | Kepler-16 template (README) |
They are Solaris Core Blender templates, built from measured data. You can download them, change the camera and make your own images.
See templates