Exoplanets form never-seen-before celestial alignment

Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

DEAL: For $25 - Add A Second Phone Number To Your Smartphone for life! Use promo code SLASHDOT25. Also, Slashdot's now on IFTTT. Check it out! Check out the new SourceForge HTML5 Internet speed test! ×

Submission + - Exoplanets form never-seen-before celestial alignment (newscientist.com)

Submitted by CelestialScience on Wednesday October 03, 2012 @01:46PM

CelestialScience writes: The heavens have aligned in a way never seen before, with two exoplanets overlapping as they cross their star. Teruyuki Hirano of the University of Tokyo, Japan, and colleagues used data from the Kepler space telescope to probe KOI-94, a star seemingly orbited by four planets. It seems that one planet candidate, KOI-94.03, passed in front of the star and then the innermost candidate, KOI-94.01, passed between the two. The phenomenon is so new it doesn't yet have a name though suggestions include "planet-planet eclipse", "double transit", "syzygy" and "exosyzygy".

This discussion was created for logged-in users only, but now has been archived. No new comments can be posted.