http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/New_planet_is_largest_discovered_that_orbits_2_suns_999.html New planet is largest discovered that orbits 2 suns by Staff Writers San Diego CA (SPX) Jun 15, 2016 Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!Comparison of the relative sizes of several Kepler circumbinary planets, from the smallest, Kepler-47 b, to the largest, Kepler-1647 b. Kepler-1647 b is substantially larger than any of the previously known circumbinary planets. Image courtesy Lynette Cook. For a larger version of this image please go here. If you cast your eyes toward the constellation Cygnus, you'll be looking in the direction of the largest planet yet discovered around a double-star system. It's too faint to see with the naked eye, but a team led by astronomers from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and San Diego State University used the Kepler Space Telescope to identify the new planet, Kepler-1647 b. The discovery was announced in San Diego, at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Planets that orbit two stars are called circumbinary planets, or sometimes "Tatooine" planets, after Luke Skywalker's homeland in "Star Wars." Using NASA's Kepler telescope, astronomers look for slight dips in brightness that hint a planet might be transiting in front of a star, blocking some of the star's light. "But finding circumbinary planets is much harder than finding planets around single stars," said SDSU astronomer William Welsh, one of the paper's coauthors. "The transits are not regularly spaced in time and they can vary in duration and even depth."
