A planet orbiting two stars has been found for the first time. NASA's Kepler observatory, which searches for planets by examining the periodic dimming of the of a star's magnitude discovered the planet, named Kepler-16b. It's situated 200 light years from Earth.

Theory suggested that such circumbinary planet systems existed but this is the first time that one has been observed and verified. So it's a double discovery, firstly the binary star system was found using the primary and secondary eclipses of the two stars and then the variance in the eclipse times verified a planetary body was in a "wide circumbinary orbit".

NASA's Kepler is back in action after a 64 hour outage. Looks like there was nothing wrong with the spacecraft other than some dodgy telemetry.

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NASA's Kepler Spacecraft Discovers Extraordinary New Planetary System

excerpt: Scientists using NASA's Kepler, a space telescope, recently discovered six planets made of a mix of rock and gases orbiting a single sun-like star, known as Kepler-11, which is located approximately 2,000 light years from Earth.

"The Kepler-11 planetary system is amazing," said Jack Lissauer, a planetary scientist and a Kepler science team member at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. "It’s amazingly compact, it’s amazingly flat, there’s an amazingly large number of big planets orbiting close to their star - we didn’t know such systems could even exist."

In other words, Kepler-11 has the fullest, most compact planetary system yet discovered beyond our own.

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It seems that Nasa's Kepler project has had it's first success in finding a rocky extra-solar planet weighing in at 1.4 times the mass of the Earth.

Wait, it's unlikely that this fellow is quite like the Earth though as it's 20 times closer to it's companion star than Mercury is to our Sun and has an orbit of only .84 of our Earth days! Not very hospitable methinks. An amazing find however and found using the tiny variations in light that Kepler sees as the planet passes in front of the star. Science fiction stuff indeed!

source: NASA