Artist's conception of the planet and its view of the two stars that make up the Gamma Cephei system. The planet orbits the bright yellow star on the right every 2.5 years. (Credit: Tim Jones/McDonald Observatory) 133K jpeg
Posted on 11/26/2006 8:42:49 PM PST by SunkenCiv
Artie Hatzes (Thueringer Landessternwarte Tautenburg), Bill Cochran (UT-Austin McDonald Observatory), and colleagues found that the planet orbits the larger star of the binary system Gamma Cephei, about 45 light-years away in the constellation Cepheus. The primary star is 1.59 times as massive as the Sun. The planet is 1.76 times as massive as Jupiter. It orbits the star at about 2 Astronomical Units (A.U.), a little further than Mars' distance from the Sun. (An A.U. is the distance from Earth to the Sun.) The second, relatively small star is only 25 to 30 A.U. from the primary star — about Uranus' distance from the Sun.
(Excerpt) Read more at mcdonaldobservatory.org ...
Artist's conception of the planet and its view of the two stars that make up the Gamma Cephei system. The planet orbits the bright yellow star on the right every 2.5 years. (Credit: Tim Jones/McDonald Observatory) 133K jpeg
2010
The planet orbits 2 AU from the larger star in the Gamma Cephei system, while the secondary star is a mere 28-30 AU distant. Orbits drawn to scale; star and planet sizes NOT to scale. (Credit: McDonald Observatory) 123K jpeg
I should have posted this in Breaking News...
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It seems like the number of planets and stars will continue to increase for quite some time to come. However, when we are all done counting, it will be time to start subtracting and then it will start getting scary.
Extrasolar planet discoveries is one of the hot areas, where the action is. Bigger and bigger terrestrial scopes, and more and more orbiting observatories of various kinds, are a sort of arms race, perhaps analogous to the 1990s competition between different amusement parks to build the biggest roller coaster. :')
But anyway, I wholeheartedly agree -- Geoff Marcy et al have discovered more than half of all currently known extrasolar planets, and that probably won't be the case in, say, five years. Meanwhile, it will be possible to find ever-smaller planets instead of these almost-a-dwarf-star objects multiples the size of Jupiter.
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