triple
catdynamics | January 11, 2011Kepler announces discovery of transiting hierarchical triple.
Extremely weird, with bonus cute animation...
KOI-126 is an interesting object.
It is a massive star (F main sequence if I caught the numbers right) primary, with two low mass M-stars orbiting it.
The M-stars orbit each other in a very tight orbit, and their center of mass in turn orbits the primary, with both secondaries transiting the primary, providing very complex and fascinating light curves.
Exquisite.
No idea how such a system could come to be.
It is very compact, could even have planets further out, and very hard to see how…
esiegel | March 3, 2008People love to speculate that Mars was once a great place for life to form, and claim that there is plenty of evidence that there used to be oceans and rivers there. But this isn't true. People used to claim there were big Canal-like features on Mars, and used this as evidence that Mars was very wet.
It was later realized that these weren't canals, but rather geological features caused by impact craters from astroids. But more recently, people have been claiming that images like the one above are examples of dried-up riverbeds.
But this turns out not to be the case. When we take a closer…