Official News page 4

REAL LIFE BEATS FED: TWO PLANETS IN ONE ORBIT

by Hazed

A few months ago, a PO added a second planet to his solar system, but he set the orbit for the new planet as the same location as his first planet. In Fed DataSpace, two planets cannot share the same orbit. That would break the laws of physics, and risk the whole fabric of the space-time continuum collapsing.

But in real life, we have news that a star system does have two planets that share the same orbit.

The Kepler telescope has been generating a flood of data about distant stars and their planets, and one of them apparently has two planets sharing an orbit. The system is named KDI-730 and it has four planets. Two of them circle the star every 9.8 days, at exactly the same orbital distance, one about 120 degrees ahead of the other.

How is this possible? It's because of gravitational "sweet spots" called Lagrange points. When one body, like a planet, orbits a much more massive body such as a star, there are two points along the planet's orbit where a third body can also orbit and stay stable - 120 degrees ahead and 120 degrees behind.

Systems like this are not at all common - this is the first one that we have found. But its existence could shed light on the early make-up of our Solar System. It is possible that the Earth once shared its orbit with a Mars-sized object, which eventually collided with the Earth, forming the moon.

However, this still doesn't mean two planets will be able to share an orbit in Fed!

Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20160-two-planets-found-sharing-one-orbit.html

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