Kepler 16b

Kepler-16b: Safe in a Resonance Cell

Abstract

This discovery confirms that Kepler-16b is an inhospitable, cold world about the size of Saturn and thought to be made up of about half rock and half gas. The parent stars are smaller than our sun. One is 69 percent the mass of the sun and the other only 20 percent. Kepler-16b orbits around both stars every 229 days, similar to Venus’ 225-day. Kepler-16b is an extrasolar planet. It is a Saturn-mass planet consisting of half gas and half rock and ice, and it orbits a binary star, Kepler-16, with a p. 09.15.11 - This artist's concept illustrates Kepler-16b, the first planet known to definitively orbit two stars - what's called a circumbinary planet. The planet, which can be seen in the foreground, was discovered by NASA's Kepler mission. The two orbiting stars regularly eclipse each other, as. Kepler-16b: a resonant survivor 2012 POPOVA E. How not to build Tatooine: the difficulty of in situ formation of circumbinary planets Kepler 16b, Kepler 34b and Kepler 35b 2012 PAARDEKOOPER S.-J., LEINHARDT Z., THEBAULT Ph. Kepler-16b Kepler-16b was the Kepler telescope’s first discovery of a planet in a “circumbinary” orbit– circling two stars, as opposed to one star in a double-star system. Like Luke Skywalker's home planet Tatooine, Kepler-16b would have two sunsets if you could stand on its surface.

The planet Kepler-16b is known to follow a circumbinary orbit around a system of two main-sequence stars. We construct stability diagrams in the 'pericentric distance-eccentricity' plane, which show that Kepler-16b is in a hazardous vicinity to the chaos domain—just between the instability 'teeth' in the space of orbital parameters. Kepler-16b survives, because it is close to the stable half-integer 11/2 orbital resonance with the central binary, safe inside a resonance cell bounded by the unstable 5/1 and 6/1 resonances. The neighboring resonance cells are vacant, because they are 'purged' by Kepler-16b, due to overlap of first-order resonances with the planet. The newly discovered planets Kepler-34b and Kepler-35b are also safe inside resonance cells at the chaos border.

• planets and satellites: dynamical evolution and stability;
• planets and satellites: formation;
• planets and satellites: individual: Kepler-16b Kepler-34b Kepler-35b;
• Astrophysics - Earth and Planetary Astrophysics;
• Nonlinear Sciences - Chaotic Dynamics

Star

Remarks

03 May 2012: Revised parameters (Bender et al. 2012):
- M_A = 0.654 ± 0.017 M_Sun
- M_B = 0.1959 ± 0.0031 M_Sun
- e = 0.15894 ± 0.00079
- ω = 263.287 ± 0.041 deg.
13 Sep 2011: Kepler 16 is an eclisping binary star with a 41.0781 day period with two K or M components (Slawson et al. 2011).

The mass given to Kepler-16(AB) is the sum of the masses of components A and B.
The parameters for the individual components are (in solar units - Doyle et al. 2011):
Star A:
Mass: 0.6897 ± 0.0035
Radius: 0.6489 ± 0.0013
Temp.: 4450 ± 150 K
[Fe/H]: -0.3 ± 0.2
Star B:
Mass: 0.20255 ± 0.00065
Radius: 0.22623 ± 0.00059
Binary system:
Period: 41.079 ± 0.000078 day
Semi-maj. axis: 0.224 ± 0.00035 AU
Inclination: 90.3401 ± 0.0019 deg.
Ecc.: 0.15944 ± 0.0006

More data

• Most recent references (ADS)

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