David Kipping

It just looks like one planet to you that's going across the star.

The temporal resolution of the data is rarely good enough to distinguish that.

And so you'd see one transit, but in fact, it's two planets very close together, which are transiting at once.

And so, yeah, we wrote a paper just recently where we developed some techniques to try and get around this problem and hopefully provide a tool where we could finally look for these plants.

The problem of detection of these plants when they're so close.

That was our focus, was how do you get around this merging problem?

So...

Whether they're out there or not, we don't know.

We're planning to do a search for them, but it remains an open question.

And I think just one of those fun astrophysics curiosities questions, whether binary planets exist in the universe.

Because then you have binary Earths, you could have binary Neptune, all sorts of wild stuff that would float the sci-fi imagination.

I would think that the force would be fairly similar because the shape of the object would deform dramatically.

to a flat geopotential essentially a uniform geopotential but it would lead to a distorted shape for the two objects i think they'd become ellipsoids facing one another um so it would be pretty wild when you you know people like flat earth or spherical earth you fly from space and you see a football shaped earth yeah it's your own planet finally there's proof and i wonder how difficult it would be to travel from one to the other because you have to overcome the one

Yeah, I mean, they're so close to each other, that helps.

And I think the most critical factor would be how massive is the planet.

That's always, I mean, one of the challenges with escaping planets, there was a fun paper one of my colleagues wrote that suggested that super earth planets may be inescapable.

If you were a civilization that were born on a super earth,

The surface gravity is so high that the chemical potential energy of hydrogen or methane, whatever fuel you're using, simply is at odds with the gravity of the planet itself.

And so our current rockets, I'm not sure with a fraction, but maybe like 90% of the rocket is fuel or something by mass.

These things would have to be like the size of the Giza pyramids of fuel with just a tiny tip on the top in order just to escape that planetary atmosphere.