Kepler-36's 'Odd Couple' Defy Planet Formation Theories 70
astroengine writes "The two planets circling Kepler-36, a sun-like star in its senior years, are as different as Earth and Neptune. But unlike the hundreds of millions of miles that separate our solar system's rocky worlds from its gas giants, Kepler-36's brood come as close as 1.2 million miles (1.9 million kilometers, or 0.01 AU) from one another — about five times the distance between Earth and the moon. This is yet another weird exoplanetary star system that defies conventional wisdom when it comes to planetary formation theories. 'The weirder they are, the more scientifically interesting they are,' Steve Howell, deputy project scientist with NASA's Kepler space telescope, told Discovery News."
Re:A field in its infancy (Score:5, Informative)
Big planets near the star are the easiest to detect.
Near the star means short orbital period and so the thing we are observing is happening more often (planet moving between us and the star, the star moving due to the gravity of the planet, phases of the planet changing the observed brightness of the star, etc). Bigger means the effect itself is larger.
If you are observing the planet directly, then bigger means easier to see. And closer to the start means brighter (though also more drowned our by the star itself) and thus also easier to see.