NASA's Kepler Space Telescope Discovers a New Wobbly Planet With Erratic Seasons

NASA's space telescope Kepler has found an unusual planet that spins wildly on its own axis, resulting in quick and unpredictable changes in seasons.

NASA's planet hunting Kepler space telescope discovered a far off wobbly world - named Kepler-413b - that spins wildly on its own axis and orbits a pair of stars every 66 days.  This 66-day orbit around the orange and red dwarf stars is titled 2.5 degree.  The tilt of Kepler-413b spin axis can vary till 30 degree over 11 years, causing erratic seasonal changes; on the other hand Earth's tilt is 23.5 degree and completes one round every 26,000 years and has not changed the tilt of its spin axis.

The astronomers were surprised to see how the newly discovered far off planet was moving on a human timescale.

Located 2,300 light years away in the constellation Cygnus, the wobbly Kepler 413-b is a super Neptune, a massive gas planet with mass 65 times that of our own planet. Based on the observations made from the blue planet, the orbit appears to be constantly moving up and down.  

Kepler hunts down planets by capturing the blinks in a star during a planet's transit. Generally the planets transit with clockwork precision, but in the case of Kepler-413b they noticed an unusual pattern.

"Looking at the Kepler data over the course of 1,500 days, we saw three transits in the first 180 days -- one transit every 66 days -- then we had 800 days with no transits at all. After that, we saw five more transits in a row," Veselin Kostov, the principal investigator on the observation, said in a statement.

There is no definite answer as to why this wobbly planet is not aligned with its stars as analysis of the planet is not complete. The astronomers, however, assume that the presence of another planetary body in the system causes the tilt in the orbit or could be the presence of a third nearby star that has a gravitational influence on the planet.

"Presumably there are planets out there like this one that we're not seeing because we're in the unfavorable period," said Peter McCullough, a team member with the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University. "And that's one of the things that Veselin is researching: Is there a silent majority of things that we're not seeing?"

Despite the rapid and erratic change in the seasons, the newly discovered planet is extremely warm to support life. Since it orbits extremely close to its host star, the temperature of the planet is too high to sustain water.

According to the astronomers, the next transit that could be visible from Earth will not happen until 2020 because the orbit moves up and down making the planet wobble to such a great extent that at times the transit is not visible from Earth.

The finding was published in The Astrophysical Journal.