Follow this link to skip to the main content
NASA Ames Research Center
RSS Send
Home > News > NASA Kepler News



Kepler-14b, Supergiant, is orbiting one of the stars in a binary star system
07.20.2011
/images/mws/Io-Volcanic2sm.jpg
Artwork by Susan Stanley for NASA Kepler Mission Education and Public Outreach.
Kepler-14b is a planet 8 times more massive than Jupiter, orbiting one of the stars in a binary star system. The planet has a short orbital period of just 7 days, while the two stars orbit each other with a much longer period of about 2800 years. The light from the planet hosting star is diluted by its companion star and this dilution significantly affects the derived planetary parameters, and if left uncorrected, leads to an underestimate of the radius and mass of the planet by 10% and 60%, respectively. Because of the small separation of the two stars on the sky, their binary nature was only revealed by using high resolution imaging. Such imaging has not been applied to the bulk of the over 500 exoplanets discovered and if some of these planets are in similar binary systems and the dilution effect has not been taken into account, this could significantly affect the derived planetary parameters.

This is the first Kepler planet confirmation from the Nordic Optical Telescope. Ground-based telescopes are vital to the success of the Kepler Mission—collaborations with observatories such as Nordic Optical Telescope enhances the effectiveness of the mission—together we accomplish more than we can do alone.

See Kepler-14b Discovery Page
and published paper by Lars Buchhave et al.

Return to News Archive