Instead of happily orbiting in circles with constant velocity, the two stars spend most of their time far apart, and a few harrowing hours racing past each other. Or, to put it another way: hours and hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. This is a heartbeat star.
Artist’s impressions of exoplanets are often wrong!
There are nine Earth-like planets detectable in the Kepler data set… better get searching!
According to planet formation theory, gas giants are more massive than rocky, terrestrial planets. But Kepler-10c is the size of Neptune, and denser than the Earth! Read on to find out more about the discovery of a new class of planets.
Kepler-93b is a super-Earth with a radius of 1.481 Earth radii, plus or minus Long Island.
This paper introduces a new method of searching for occultations in Kepler data to study the albedos of close in super-Earths.