Scientists, using NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, have discovered a Jupiter-like planet orbiting a system of two stars, making it the largest such cosmic body ever found. The planet has a mass and radius nearly identical to that of Jupiter, making it the largest transiting circumbinary planet ever found. And it is much further away from its stars than any other circumbinary planet, breaking with the tendency for circumbinary planets to have close-in orbits. “Kepler-1647b is important because it is the tip of the iceberg of a theoretically predicted population of large, long-period circumbinary planets,” said Welsh. “But finding circumbinary planets is much harder than finding planets around single stars,” said William Welsh, from SDSU.

Source: The Hindu June 14, 2016 07:07 UTC