Exo planets
By: Corbyn Everrette Alexander
The youngest exoplanet yet discovered is less than 1 million years old and orbits Coku Tau 4, a star 420 light-years away. Astronomers inferred the planet’s presence from an enormous hole in the dusty disk that girdles the star. The hole is 10 times the size of Earth’s orbit around the Sun and probably caused by the planet clearing a space in the dust as it orbits the star. There is no name.
The Kepler-223 planetary system has long-term stability because its four planets interact gravitationally to keep the beat of a carefully choreographed dance as they orbit their host star. For example, each time the innermost planet (Kepler-223b) orbits the system's star 3 times, the second-closest planet (Kepler-223c) orbits precisely 4 times, and these two planets return to the same positions relative to each other and their host star. The orbital periods of the four planets of the Kepler-233 system have ratios of exactly 3 to 4, 4 to 6, and 6 to 8. The ratio of these orbits is so precise that they provide a stabilizing influence for the planetary system.
The four planets of the Kepler-223 star system seem to have little in common with the planets of Earth's own solar system. And yet a new study shows that the Kepler-223 system is trapped in an orbital configuration that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune may have broken from in the early history of the solar system.
"This announcement more than doubles the number of confirmed planets from Kepler," Siad Ellan Stofan, chief scientist at NASA Headquarters. "This gives us hope that somewhere out there, around a star much like ours, we can eventually discover another Earth."