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Kepler Finds Bizarre Systems

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday March 2, 2011 @03:47AM from the spinning-round-and-round dept.

RedEaredSlider writes "The Kepler Space Telescope has run across some truly bizarre solar systems. Among the candidates: a system with full-on planets orbiting in a Trojan configuration, one with planets that all orbit their planets in less than 10 days, and one in which resonances between small and large worlds essentially keep the thing together."

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Re:Planets orbiting Planets? by Anonymous Coward · 2011-03-02 04:14 · Score: 1, Informative

Shut up, dolt.
Orbital Resonance Visualization by thasmudyan · 2011-03-02 04:24 · Score: 3, Informative

I was having trouble imagining the 8:6:4:3 resonance pattern, so I dug out this very cool visualisation: http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/WebGL/KOI-730.html (needs a WebGL-capable browser, for some reason FF 4 doesn't work though).