You’re doing some late afternoon work on the habitat as part of humanity’s first exoplanet settlement, but the sun is going down so you’re trying to speed things up. Just as the light dims, everything suddenly starts getting brighter. You look up and see the sun starting to rise again, except it’s your second sun. You kick yourself for not checking the daily sunrise and sunset logs, but you’re happy you get to put in a bit more work before you eat dinner.

This scenario might be centuries away from reality, but it hasn’t stopped an international team of present-day scientists from searching for exoplanets orbiting both stars in a two-star, also called circumbinary planets (CBPs). In findings recently published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of researchers from the United States and Australia have brought us one step closer to better understanding these unique worlds and whether they’d be suitable for life beyond Earth.

For the study, the researchers examined new data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) spacecraft regarding new circumbinary planets. What makes this study unique is it introduces a new method for identifying CBPs, with the longstanding method being the transit method, which involves measuring a dip in starlight as an exoplanet passes in front of its host star. However, this makes finding CBPs tricky since it must pass in front of both of its stars simultaneously. To combat this, the researchers used a method called apsidal precession, which measures the gradual twisting of the orbit’s shape that is produced from the gravitational influence by the planet on the stars.

After analyzing data from 1,590 eclipsing binary stars that exhibit apsidal precession, the researchers discovered 27 new candidate CBPs, but their physical properties like size remain inconclusive. The researchers noted how the radial velocity method, which is common exoplanet discovery method that measures the wobble between a star and planet, could be used to better characterize and confirm these 27 candidates.

“Identifying transits in binary systems clearly is challenging, but we’d like to know more about the range of planets that can form around two gravitationally bound stars,” said Margo Thornton, who is a PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales in Sydney and lead author of the study. “So, we developed a survey to search for planets using stellar eclipses that is not limited to the orientation of the planet’s orbit.”

This study is monumental in several ways, because not only did it successfully use a new method for identifying exoplanets, but the 27 CBP candidates could potentially more than double the total confirmed number of CBPs, which currently stands at 18. While it could take years to confirm these 27 candidates as real exoplanets, this new method nonetheless could open doors to identifying more CBPs faster and more efficiently than long-standing methods like the transit method. As noted, this is due to not requiring the CBP to align with both their stars to measure its transit. Instead, the apsidal precession method measures the orbital twisting that occurs as the planet exerts its gravitational influence on the stars.

Launched in April 2018, TESS was designed to be a successor to NASA’s Kepler mission and its follow-up K2 mission, with the latter being the same telescope just a different type of mission since the telescope’s steering wheels broke. While Kepler/K2 confirmed the existence of more than 3,300 exoplanets over more than 9.5 years, TESS has confirmed the existence of 855 exoplanets, along with more than 7,900 candidates. The primary difference between Kepler/K2 and TESS is the former focused on one patch of sky while TESS conducted an all-sky survey to find its exoplanets.

How many more circumbinary planets will scientists discover in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!

As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!

A wildfire sparked by the flare of a shipwrecked mariner has burned nearly a fifth of Santa Rosa Island and marks what officials called the largest blaze recorded on the island in modern history.

Firefighters ferried in personnel, equipment and pallets of supplies by boat amid gusty winds and rough seas as they raced to save sensitive wildlife, including the continent’s rarest species of pine tree. Preservationists were worried the flames could burn through pristine terrain unique to the region.

“It’s one of our gems of the California coast,” said Michael Cohen, chair of the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary Advisory Council. “It looks like it did 100 years ago — it’s just untouched.”

The fire had burned more than 10,000 acres and was 0% contained.

Flames spread up steep slopes, chewing through island chaparral, along with some grass and brush, said Mike Theune, fire information officer assigned to the incident.

Two historic buildings were destroyed — Johnson’s Lee Equipment Shed and the Wreck Line Camp Cabin — along with a storage structure, he said. A helicopter evacuated 11 employees of the National Park Service, which manages the island as part of the Channel Islands National Park, on Sunday.

Flames were about a half-mile from the island’s stand of Torrey pines — one of just two places in the world where the species grows naturally, Theune said. Firefighters were seeking to contain the fire using preexisting features such as roads, ridges and trails rather than carving a fire line through the island’s sensitive ecosystems, he said.

Each of the Channel Islands has endemic species and subspecies, including island foxes, that are found nowhere else, said Phyllis Grifman, vice chair of the advisory council. “They’re kind of known as the Galapagos of [North] America.”

Santa Rosa is home to six endemic plants, as well as the island spotted skunk and rare birds, Cohen said. It also has a rich cultural history — North America’s oldest definitively dated human remains were found here in 1959, and there are culturally significant Chumash sites, said Cohen, who is also president of the Santa Barbara Adventure Co.

The fire was inadvertently sparked by a man who crashed his sailboat into rocks on the island’s rugged south side and then fired emergency flares to signal for help, according to the U.S. Coast Guard and eyewitness accounts.

Jace Malone, who helms the New Hustler sportfishing boat, saw smoke around 9:30 a.m. Friday and drove closer to the island so the children on his boat could take a look. Then he saw someone waving.

A man stood on a small sliver of unburned land, surrounded by scorched vegetation, Malone said. Small pieces of his vessel were scattered among the rocks. He’d somehow scratched “SOS” into the blackened earth, a photo released by the Coast Guard shows.

A Coast Guard Air Station Ventura MH-60T Jayhawk aircrew rescued a 67-year-old mariner after his sailboat crashed into the rocks at Santa Rosa Island.

(U.S. Coast Guard)

Malone called the Coast Guard, which sent a helicopter to hoist the man up, he said. The mariner, who was not seriously injured, had spent Thursday night stranded on the island, the agency said in a social media post.

Windy conditions initially fanned the flames and made it difficult for firefighters to reach the blaze. A gale warning was in effect from Friday night to early Monday, and forecasters had warned boats of all sizes to remain in harbor, said Bryan Lewis, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard.

Winds also precluded the use of water-dropping aircraft: Firefighters attempted one drop, but the wind blew the water away before it reached the ground, Theune said.

Still, firefighters reached the island less than 12 hours after the fire was confirmed, which “was no easy feat,” he said. They traveled by boat, which he described as the most time-efficient mode of transport and also necessary to accommodate all the supplies needed to fight a wildfire. “That’s what makes fighting a fire like this different, as opposed to mainland firefight where we can drive in trucks and equipment,” he said.

A firefighting aircraft was able to fly over the fire Monday and was conferring with firefighters on the ground to decide whether it would be possible to use more aircraft, Theune said. About 70 people were assigned to the fire, and more were on the way, he said.

The last major fire on the Channel Islands was the Scorpion fire, which burned 1,368 acres on Santa Cruz Island in 2020.