CNN 2011-09-22

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-Yes, I was me and my team. We took a lot of groundbased observing and a lot of modeling, and also it was quite the team that actually made the discovery. I got to lead it, because I've been in the field long time.  

 

-So tell us what you saw and what was evidence that you'd actually discovered this planet that had two suns.

 

-Well, basically what Kepler does is kind of a wide-angle verison of the Hubble Space Telescope and it is in space. And basically what it records is the brightness of the stars. So what happened is we saw two stars that orbit around each other, and those are called eclipsing binaries¹. And then, in front of those two, there was a planet that went across all of them. So now there's the planet was orbiting exactly the same plane as the two stars, so the two stars orbiting around each other actually have a planet orbiting both of them at the same time. and we saw when the planet went in front of the two stars, we saw this double dip, and that double dip was the planet.

 

-And tell me, Lawrence, what did you think when you discover this?

 

-Oh, it was pretty exciting, because you know what scientist like is exceptions to things. For example, if we find life on Mars, then we can compare with life on earth, and it may not have DNA² and so on. so it tells us what are the general characteristics, and what are the special characteristics. Well, in this case it is about planetary system, we've discovered a fundamentally different kind of plenetary system. And so it is really exciting because that will have repercussions³ for us understanding our planet system by comparison with something really different. And I have to say...

 

-You have.

-I'm just gonna say...

-I am sorry to interrupt. Yes?

-It wasn't very long before we start calling it a tatooine that might have.

 

-Oh that is exactly the point that I want to talk about that you have nicknamed it tatooine after George Lucas' Star Wars. I want to ask you, you know, something that was science fiction back in 1977 you've now discovered in 2011. Have you contacted George Lucas'

 

-Well actually yes.this morning at NASA press conference we had a reprensentative from Industrial Light& Magic, John Knoll⁴. And he sat next to me and we compared notes, and, yeah, George Lucas sent him down to partake of the NASA press conference, and he was a lot of fun because you know, you have to picture something before you can look for it. And so we wanted to acknowledge that they were the thought pioneers that, you know, had enough faith of circum-binary planets existing to put the hero Star Wars on such a planet, and so at least we could do is honor them when we find the real thing.

 

-Yeah, exactly. I'm sure he was very chaffed. Lawrence, very very quickly, can this planetary system, can it support life?

 

-Well, now it's too far away. It's essentially⁵ in the orbit that Venus is in our solar system. But the two stars it orbits, one's orange and one's red, are much smaller than our sun, so it's just outside. I would say it's about, the temperature on the planet are really colder than in Arctic at best.

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