Kepler Finds Bizarre Systems

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."

Comments

Planets orbiting Planets?

[nitehawk214]

>one with planets that all orbit their planets in less than 10 days

Yeah, that is bizarre.

Re:Planets orbiting Planets?

[fahlesr1]

That's no moon! Its a space station!

Re:Fleet of Worlds

[TheMidget]

Any Klemperer rosettes?

Don't forget to put on a Trojan before heading into the rosette...

Orbital Resonance Visualization

[thasmudyan]

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).

Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

Yo Dawg, I heard you like orbits, so I put a planet on your planet so you can orbit while you orbit!

Re:Re-defining what's normal

[geekoid]

There is no overall 'normal' solar system behavior.

There is normal behavior for a specific solar system, but that won't apply to other solar systems.

What we have is a hell of a lot of possibilities within the dynamics of gravity.

SO we will see a lot of behavior we didn't think of.

NOT Solar systems!

[Ecuador]

You can call them planetary systems or even star/stellar systems if you refer to their stars, but they are definitely not "solar" systems since they are... well... extrasolar!