I know some of you have an interest in astronomy topics, so I thought I'd share this discovery and gloat a little bit. Back in 2003 I began working on the topic of habitability in binary star systems, that is, the possibility of life arising in systems where there are two suns (like Tatooine in Star Wars). The search for planets around other stars had been going for about a decade but all of the efforts had been on looking at single stars (like our solar system), mainly because it was easier. (For some reason, I am always attracted to science problems that are hard and that others want to ignore. I'll leave for another time the discussion of how our model of funding science research makes it very difficult for people like me to get funding to do such work.) You might think that binary star systems would be very rare, but that is not at all the case. It is likely that most star systems are binaries. They are very common. If you are going to understand habitability in the galaxy, you have to understand how it works in binaries.
In 2003, I proposed to the NASA Exobiology (life outside the solar system) program to model the formation and evolution of planetary systems in which the planets orbited the binary star pair (rather than just orbiting one of the stars, with the second star very distant, a much easier and much more boring theoretical problem). The response by the reviewers was that such systems were "extreme" and unlikely to be interesting. Subsequent resubmissions of the proposal met with the same fate.
Yesterday a paper was published in the journal "Science" about a binary system called Kepler-16, because it was discovered with the Kepler satellite. It is an eclipsing binary system where the orbital plane is oriented close to edge-on as seen from the Earth so that the stars pass in front of each other, causing the brightness to drop (sort of like a solar eclipse).In Kepler-16 there is a planet orbiting around the two stars and it also passes in front of the stars causing (smaller) eclipses. The way Kepler works is it measures the brightnesses of stars, extremely accurately, so these eclipses are easily seen when you plot the brightness of the star system over time (called the "light curve"). Here is the light curve from the paper (vertical axis is brightness and the horizontal axis is time):
Now, I realize that this is seriously geeky stuff, but I can only describe that data set as beautiful. Observing with telescopes from the ground, the scatter in the measurements is much higher and we can see the deep star eclipses (blue and yellow) and the deeper planet eclipse (green), but the scatter would be much, much higher and shallower one (red) would be impossible. And I must admit to feeling a great sense of satisfaction in seeing the discovery of a type of system whose importance I championed almost a decade ago while my colleagues dismissed it.
Interestingly, I did a painting of a similar (but imaginary) system a few weeks back:
The planet in Kepler-16 is more like Saturn than the imaginary one I painted, but the stars are pretty similar. I guess it's time to do another painting, and maybe time to dust off that old proposal and see if my colleagues have finally opened their eyes.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Devaclis
