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Two Planets Found Sharing One Orbit
dweezil-n0xad writes "Buried in the flood of data from the Kepler telescope is a planetary system unlike any seen before. Two of its apparent planets share the same orbit around their star. If the discovery is confirmed, it would bolster a theory that Earth once shared its orbit with a Mars-sized body that later crashed into it, resulting in the moon's formation."
The problem with the planet detection methods used by the Kepler team is that it is all calculated based on occultations; the slight dimming of the star's light as a planet passes between that star and the Kepler satellite. This only works if the planet in question is 1) HUGE or 2) very close to the star or 3) the Earth just HAPPENS to be in the plane of the planet's orbit around the star. That's why we're discovering so many enormous planets with orbital periods in the range of only a few days. But the nice thing about the Kepler data seems to be that it's eliminating many of the "it could NEVER have happened that way!" explanations. With upwards of 500 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy and we've looked only at a few thousand, it looks more and more that ANYTHING is possible when it comes to planetary formation.