Real Star Wars Planet just like Tatooine with 2 suns

NEW YORK - The 1977 movie Star Wars featured a planet with two suns called Tatooine. Now scientists said they have found the first real two-sun planet 200 light years away from Earth.
"After 35 years, science fiction has finally become reality," said Mr Alan Boss, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington and an author of the study on the planet released on Thursday by the journal Science.

The new planet, called Kepler-16b, is about the size and mass of Saturn, and moves in a circular orbit 65 million miles from its suns.

Unlike Tatooine, Kepler-16b is far too cold to support life, with temperatures about 100 degrees centigrade lower than Earth, Mr Boss said.

The Kepler-16b planet's two suns are different sizes, with the larger one glowing orange and the smaller sun a more reddish colour.

Some days the two suns rise and set simultaneously, while at other times they rise or set a couple of hours apart.

While some double-star systems, of which there are billions in the galaxy, have been suspected to harbour planets, those smaller bodies have never been seen.

Beyond the wow factor, astronomers said the discovery - as so many discoveries of so-called exoplanets have done - had thrown a wrench into another well-received theory of how planets can and cannot form.

"In other words," said Ms Sara Seager, a planetary expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not part of the discovery team, "people don't really know how to form this planet".

It was long thought, Ms Seager said, that for its orbit to be stable, a planet belonging to two stars at once would have to be at least seven times as far from the stars as the stars were from each other.

According to that, Kepler-16b would have to be twice as far out as it is to survive.

"This planet broke the rule," she said.
todayonline

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• star wars
• two suns
• Kepler
• science fiction
• NASA
• Tatooine
• space
• alien
• ufo

[UnsmilingPickle]

cool that'd be funny if they found luke on it lol

[pshaw951]

It'd be naive for science to assume that what we dream up isn't real somewhere. Science fiction is science fact unrealized at a given point in time.

[XtraDisney]

im doin a project on this

[nofovos]

maybe they prepare as for ours dwarf planet, when we see 2 suns >:P

[starwarsfan0917]

look closley you can see the millenium falcon taking off. lol