A BULGARIAN IN THE TEAM THAT DISCOVERED A PLANET ORBITING TWO STARS

The Bulgarian Veselin Kostov, a NASA Goddard postdoctoral fellow, has been named as lead author of a soon-to-be published study in the American Astrophysical Journal related to the discovery of a new planet Kepler-1647 b that orbits two suns.

The discovery was announced at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in San Diego on 13th of June, NASA’s website says. It was made by a team led by astronomers from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and San Diego State University (SDSU) in California, who used NASA's Kepler Space Telescope to identify the new planet, Kepler-1647b.

Kostov graduated with a degree in physics from Sofia University in 2002. He continued his study in the faculty of physics and astronomy in the University of Oklahoma. He has a PhD in astrophysics from Johns Hopkins Univesrsity. Kostov worked in Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Columbia University. His research interests are in the area of extrasolar planets. In 2012, he was a member of a team which discovered the four-star planet KIC 4862625, in a four-star solar system.

Kepler-1647b has a mass and radius nearly identical to that of Jupiter, making it the largest transiting circumbinary planet ever found. The planet takes 1,107 days – just over three years – to orbit its host stars. The planet orbits two stars, which are close to each other, as a binary pair. The two suns are pretty similar to our own, one is slightly smaller and the other slightly larger.

Like Jupiter, Kepler-1647b is a gas giant, making the planet unlikely to host life. Yet if the planet has large moons, they could potentially be suitable for life, NASA’s website explains.

Kepler - 1647b has been the 11th such planter discovered since 2005. It is 3,700 light-years away from Earth and approximately 4.4 billion years old.

Scientists discover exoplanets as they pass in front of their suns, leading to a slight reduction in their light. This technique called "astronomical transit" allows to assume the mass of the planet and distance from its star.

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