May The Fourth, a.k.a. Star Wars Day, may have come and gone, but with it came an announcement from a team of researchers that found 27 potential planets orbiting two stars, just like Luke Skywalker’s home world of Tatooine. They aren’t quite in a galaxy far, far away, as they are still firmly within the Milky Way galaxy, but hey, close enough.
The findings, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, could more than double the number of known “circumbinary” planets, aka, worlds that orbit two suns. That means maybe one day, deep in humanity’s future, someone will be able to step out of their desert igloo and stare longingly at the setting twin suns as they yearn to be anywhere but here, blissfully unaware of the grand, galaxy-spanning adventure that awaits them.
Until now, astronomers had identified fewer than 20 of these systems, compared to the more than 6,000 planets found orbiting single stars like our own sun.
Astronomers May Have Found 27 Real-Life Tatooines in the Milky Way
The discovery comes to us via a shift in approach. While scientists used to rely on the transit method, which involves watching for dips in a star’s brightness as a planet passes in front of it, this time around, the researchers analyzed the timing shifts in the eclipses of two stars. If anything were to throw off that rhythm, it would suggest that a third body (maybe a planet) is hiding out within that system.
The researchers used data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite to examine 1,600 binary star systems and found that 36 showed unexplained disturbances. Of those 36, 27 have a decent shot at being planets, which would range in size from anywhere between Neptune to a bit larger than Jupiter. Though none of them have been confirmed as planets just yet. Scientists still need to do a lot of science, like analyzing their light signatures, to determine whether they are planets, brown dwarves, or something else entirely.
All told, the discovery is yet another in a long string of discoveries stretching back decades that strongly suggest that for all these years, whenever we use our highly advanced technology to peer into the stars, there are still so many planets we didn’t notice because we were looking at them in the right way or weren’t using sufficiently advanced technology.
There’s a decent chance that a Tatooine-like world with twin suns wouldn’t be quite as habitable as Tatooine, and would actually have extreme, unstable environments. There are enough of them out there to suggest that there might be some that, like Earth, exist in a sweet spot where life could thrive.
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