Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Thu, 22 Sep 2011 17:00:00 PDT Michael Ho http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100418/2350319063/dailydirt-strange-new-worlds.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100418/2350319063/dailydirt-strange-new-worlds.shtml

Kepler 16b isn't the lecture hall for your astronomy exam. It's the un-trademarked name of Tatooine. This is the first planet that's been observed orbiting a binary star system. [url]

The Kepler telescope has been a busy bee. It's found two planets sharing the same orbit. These two co-orbiting planets, in the KOI-730 system, are always 120 degrees apart, so they don't collide. [url]

The planet TrES-2b is so dark. How dark is it? It reflects less than 1 percent of the incident light from its parent star, and so it's darker than coal. (sorry, no joke here.) [url]

Apparently, there are lots of "free agent" planets floating around the universe without a star to orbit. Expect a disaster movie where one of these lonely planets is headed straight for Earth (nevermind the statistical improbabilities). [url]

To discover more links on space exploration, check out what's floating around in StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

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