A word of caution for any Earthlings hoping to glimpse
a double sunset though: you'd need to travel 200 light years first, and
once you got there, you wouldn't be able to stand on the planet itself
– it is gaseous.
At the heart of the newly discovered binary solar system, an orange star
and a smaller red one orbit each other every 41 days, separated by
about half the distance between Mercury and the sun. The orange dwarf
and its red-dwarf partner have 69 and 20 per cent of the sun's mass,
respectively.
The clues that the planet is there were picked up by NASA's Kepler space telescope.
It detected tiny dips in brightness due to the planet occasionally
passing in front of each star and blocking some of its light, reports a
team led by Laurance Doyle
of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. The planet traces
out an orbit that is close to circular with the twin suns approximately
at its centre.
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