Planets that orbit two stars are called circumbinary planets, or sometimes “Tatooine” planets, after Luke Skywalker’s homeland in “Star Wars.” Using the Kepler telescope, astronomers look for slight dips in brightness that hint a planet might be transiting in front of a star, blocking some of the star’s light.
“But finding circumbinary planets is much harder than finding planets around single stars,” said SDSU astronomer William Welsh, one of the paper’s co-authors. “The transits are not regularly spaced in time and they can vary in duration and even depth.”
Once a candidate planet is found, researchers employ advanced computer programs to determine if it really is a planet. It can be a gruelling process. Laurance Doyle, a co-author on the paper and astronomer at the SETI Institute, noticed a transit back in 2011. But more data and several years of analysis were needed to confirm the transit was indeed caused by a circumbinary planet. A network of amateur astronomers in the KELT Follow-Up Network provided additional observations that helped the researchers estimate the planet’s mass. The research has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal with Veselin Kostov, a NASA Goddard postdoctoral fellow, as lead author.
“It’s a bit curious that this biggest planet took so long to confirm, since it is easier to find big planets than small ones,” said SDSU astronomer Jerome Orosz, another co-author on the study. “It took so long to confirm because its orbital period is so long.”
The planet takes 1,107 days (just over 3 years) to orbit its host stars, the longest period of any confirmed transiting exoplanet found so far. The planet is also much further away from its stars than any other circumbinary planet, breaking with the tendency for circumbinary planets to have close-in orbits. Interestingly, its orbit puts the planet within the so-called habitable zone. Like Jupiter, however, Kepler-1647b is a gas giant, making the planet unlikely to host life. Yet if the planet has large moons, they could potentially be suitable for life.
“Habitability aside, Kepler-1647b is important because it is the tip of the iceberg of a theoretically predicted population of large, long-period circumbinary planets,” Welsh said.