Two Earth-Sized Planets Born of Battered "Jupiter"?
Feb 15, 2012; 9:57 AM ET
An artist's impression of two planets orbiting close to a hot subdwarf star.
Illustration courtesy S. Charpinet
Two Earth-size worlds orbiting perilously close to their dying star may be the fractured remnants of a Jupiter-like gas giant, a new study suggests.
The planetary pair-discovered using NASA's Kepler space telescope and announced in the journal Nature last December-are just under Earth's radius. Both orbit a so-called subdwarf B star dubbed KIC 05807616, which sits about 4,000 light-years away.
(Also see "Smallest Exoplanets Found-Each Tinier Than Earth.")
When sunlike stars run out of hydrogen fuel, they enter a red giant phase, in which their gas envelopes can swell to several hundred times their original size.
Eventually a red giant's gas envelope will slough off entirely, leaving behind a dense stellar corpse known as a white dwarf. Sometimes, however, a red giant will lose its gas envelope prematurely to form a subdwarf B star, like KIC 05807616.
View the full article from the National Geographic website.
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