PopSci Q&A: How Digging Through Discarded Data Uncovered A Real Tattooine
Kepler-16b With Its Stars The planet blocks out the light of the smaller star, which also blocks out the light of its bigger partner. This double-dip in brightness was key to discovering the distant Kepler-16b system. Laurance Doyle, who led the discovery, describes their complicated Newtonian dance thusly: "Picture a mom, a dad and a baby. The mom and dad are dancing, twirling around, and the baby is moving around them, across your line of sight. The dad is on the left, so the baby blocks out the dad first and then the mom. When it comes around again, the mother happens to be twirling, so she's on the left this time, and the baby blocks out the mom and then the dad. That happens because the two people are twirling." NASA/JPL-CaltechOne man's noise is another man's long-sought signal In the pantheon of modern astronomical explorers, the Kepler Space Telescope ranks...