SDSU Prof, Alumus Publish Article About Worlds With Two Suns

San Diego State astronomer William Welsh and another SDSU alumnus are co-authors of an article in the November issue of Scientific American that describes the bizarre circumstances of planets that orbit two starts.

Welsh wrote the piece with Laurance Doyle, a researcher at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., who earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in astronomy from SDSU, according to a report on the SDSU Web site.

In “Worlds With Two Suns,” Welsh and Doyle relate astronomers' search for “circumbinary planets,” the term for planets that orbit two stars.

The article describes how the gravity from two stars causes the planets to follow complex orbits and experience wild climate changes.

NASA’s Kepler Mission, which has sought planets around distant stars, made the discovery possible. In the fall of 2011, a team of Kepler scientists led by Doyle with Welsh and fellow SDSU astronomy professor Jerome Orosz, announced the first detection of a circumbinary planet.

Here's a link to Welsh's class page at SDSU.