Slashdot Mirror
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."
Possibly. As neither has "cleared its neighbourhood" of other masses in their neighborhood, they might be back to being called planetoids like Pluto. Both are to be considered "dwarf planets" until they collide and one becomes obviously dominant. There's already bits that cover things like this, but people are already arguing about the exampled in our own solar system. I be something like this would cause even more hub bub and another conference to further define the meaning of planet yet again.
Is an estimated minimum of 2 million more years not stable enough for you? With the two planets orbiting their star about every 10 earth days, that's over 70 million orbits, at minimum. What makes this an interesting find it that it IS unlikely, and it does NOT require external forces. Hence there's an article about it. :)
As referenced by TFA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point
Unless you're claiming that nothing is stable because y'know, entropy, man!
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.