AAS: Kepler triple weirdness

Kepler announces discovery of transiting hierarchical triple.
Extremely weird, with bonus cute animation...

KOI-126 is an interesting object.
It is a massive star (F main sequence if I caught the numbers right) primary, with two low mass M-stars orbiting it.
The M-stars orbit each other in a very tight orbit, and their center of mass in turn orbits the primary, with both secondaries transiting the primary, providing very complex and fascinating light curves.

Exquisite.

No idea how such a system could come to be.
It is very compact, could even have planets further out, and very hard to see how it formed.
Think we have more to learn.

Paper is coming out now on Science Express, data is on MAST and Kepler archives,
team produced a gorgeous animation.
Have to dash to a meeting, will add links later...

see also livescience.com

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Another one of the fundamental properties of a chaotic system is dense periodic orbits. It's a bit of an odd one: a chaotic system doesn't have to have periodic orbits at all. But if it does, then they have to be dense.
It's been quite a while since my last chaos theory post. I've been caught up in other things, and I've needed to do some studying. Based on a recommendation from a commenter, I've gotten another book on Chaos theory, and it's frankly vastly better than the two I was using before.
By now everyone's heard of Felix Baumgartner and his record-breaking leap out of a balloon some 24 miles over the New Mexico desert.
One of my favorite podcasts to listen to while driving or mowing the lawn is [Buzz Out Loud](http://bol.cnet.com). Buzz Out Loud (BOL) is basically just a tech-based podcast, but very entertaining.

That'd be a fun one to do eclipse timing analysis on to attempt to detect outer planets... wonder if there are any circumtriple or even circumquadruple planets out there...

So where is this cute animation? Do we get to see it too?

By astro ranger (not verified) on 24 Jan 2011 #permalink