Usually, running five minutes late is a bad thing since you might lose your dinner reservation or miss out on tickets to the latest show. But when a planet runs five minutes late, astronomers2 get excited because it suggests that another world is nearby. NASA's Kepler spacecraft has spotted3 a planet that alternately runs late and early in its orbit because a second, "invisible" world is tugging（用力拉） on it. This is the first definite detection of a previously4 unknown planet using this method. No other technique could have found the unseen companion.
"This invisible planet makes itself known by its influence on the planet we can see," said astronomer1 Sarah Ballard of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). Ballard is lead author on the study, which has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.
"It's like having someone play a prank（恶作剧） on you by ringing your doorbell and running away. You know someone was there, even if you don't see them when you get outside," she added.
Both the seen and unseen worlds orbit the Sun-like star Kepler-19, which is located 650 light-years from Earth in the constellation（星座） Lyra. The 12th-magnitude star is well placed for viewing by backyard telescopes on September evenings.
Kepler locates planets by looking for a star that dims slightly as a planet transits5 the star, passing across the star's face from our point of view. Transits give one crucial piece of information -- the planet's physical size. The greater the dip in light, the larger the planet relative to its star. However, the planet and star must line up exactly for us to see a transit6.
The first planet, Kepler-19b, transits its star every 9 days and 7 hours. It orbits the star at a distance of 8.4 million miles, where it is heated to a temperature of about 900 degrees Fahrenheit7. Kepler-19b has a diameter of 18,000 miles, making it slightly more than twice the size of Earth. It may resemble a "mini-Neptune8," however its mass and composition remain unknown.
If Kepler-19b were alone, each transit would follow the next like clockwork. Instead, the transits come up to five minutes early or five minutes late. Such transit timing9 variations show that another world's gravity is pulling on Kepler-19b, alternately speeding it up or slowing it down.
Historically, the planet Neptune was discovered similarly. Astronomers tracking Uranus10 noticed that its orbit didn't match predictions. They realized that a more distant planet might be nudging Uranus and calculated the expected location of the unseen world. Telescopes soon observed Neptune near its predicted position.
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