Kepler Finds Very Wobbly Planet
NASA’s planet hunting space telescope Kepler had identified a strange world 2300 light-years away, named Kepler-413b in the constellation Cygnus. Whats interesting about this planet is that its unusual wobbles on its spin axis like a child’s top.
This planet from binary star system can wobble as much as 30 degrees over 11 years and therefor making the seasons in the planet so erratic. You can compare this to Earth’s precession of 23.5 degrees over 26000 years.
This kepler-413b is a gas giant with mass of 65 times that of Earths and orbiting slightly closer to the star’s inner edge therefor the planet’s temperature is too high for liquid water of life.
Kepler-413b is circling its duo stars, orange and red dwarf every 66 days. Scientists studying the planet says “Looking at the Kepler data over the course of 1,500 days, we saw three transits in the first 180 days — one transit every 66 days — then we had 800 days with no transits at all. After that, we saw five more transits in a row”. The next transit viewable from Earth is not possible until 2020 because of high rate of wobble.
Kepler mission is headed by NASA’s Ames Research Center and it is space based telescope specifically looking for planets outside our solar system.