New research freshly baked from the Cool Worlds Lab! Emily Sandford's new paper shows how we can actually use planets to learn about the stars they go around in an important new piece of work. When we use planets to learn about stars, we call them "stellar anchors", since they lock down the stellar properties. This flips a classic mantra on it's head, know the star know the planet becomes know the planet know the star. Emily explains all in this week's Cool Worlds video. ::More about this Video:: ► Emily Sandford & David Kipping 2017, "Know the Planet, Know the Star: Precise Stellar Densities from Kepler Transit Light Curves", AJ accepted: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.07293 ► Sara Seager & Gabrielle Mallen-Ornelas 2003, "On the Unique Solution of Planet and Star Parameters from an Extrasolar Planet Transit Light Curve", ApJ, 585, 1038: https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0206228 ► Scientific American article on our work, "Astronomers Use Shadowy Alien Worlds to Peer Inside Stars": https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/astronomers-use-shadowy-alien-worlds-to-peer-inside-stars/ ► Columbia University Department of Astronomy: http://www.astro.columbia.edu ► Cool Worlds Lab website: http://coolworlds.astro.columbia.edu ► Outro music by 8-bit Universe "Harder Better Faster Stronger [8 Bit Cover Tribute to Daft Punk]": https://8bituniverse.bandcamp.com/track/harder-better-faster-stronger-8-bit-tribute-to-daft-punk ::Playlists For Channel:: Latest Cool Worlds Videos ► http://bit.ly/NewCoolWorlds Cool Worlds Research ► http://bit.ly/CoolWorldsResearch Guest Videos ► http://bit.ly/CoolWorldsGuests Q&A Videos ► http://bit.ly/CoolWorldsQA Tabby's Star ► http://bit.ly/TabbysStar Science of TV/Film ► http://bit.ly/ScienceMovies ::Follow us:: SUBSCRIBE to the channel http://bit.ly/CoolWorldsSubscribe Cool Worlds Lab http://coolworlds.astro.columbia.edu Twitter https://twitter.com/david_kipping Instagram https://www.instagram.com/cool.worlds THANKS