Scientists have discovered a planet that, like the iconic Star Wars planet Tatooine, orbits two suns.
Fans of Star Wars and real-life space travel will enjoy the latest news from Space.com, which reports that a new planet, titled BEBOP-1c, which resembles conditions on Luke Skywalker’s home planet Tatooine, has been discovered orbiting a pair of twin suns. For many years, astronomers considered the possibility of a Tatooine-style planet pure science fiction, as the first planets around it were not discovered in the far reaches of space until 2011.
While binary stars are known to orbit each other in the Milky Way galaxy, the peripheral planets orbit in a figure-of-eight style orbiting both binary stars at the same time, making for the amazing visualization of a double Tatooine sunset from the original 1977 star Wars movie reality about all the microscopic living things inhabiting the distant exoplanet. Lead astrophysicist conducting the study, Matthew Standing, told Space.com that the first planet of this style, Kepler-16b, was discovered more than 5,000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, the Cygnus.
Kepler-16b is named after the deep space telescope that uprooted it, NASA’s Kepler telescope. In recent years, the James Webb Space Telescope has done the hardest work locating new exoplanets and stars in the vast expanses of space, including a series of black holes that may have formed near the Big Bang. To discover the planet Tatooine, however, Standing and his team of scientists used the aptly named Very Large Telescope located in Chile’s Atacama Desert.
BEBOP-1c is only the 15th planet from Tatooine to be discovered in infinite space, making the circular orbit extremely rare. Of course, the concept that brought George Lucas’ original creative vision to life proves that reality can sometimes be stranger than fiction. BEBOP-1c is a gas giant with a mass 65 times that of planet Earth and takes an expected 215-day orbit to complete a loop around its twin suns.
The planet Tatooine also serves as an amazing lesson in inclusivity in the world of science, as a high school student helped discover the solar system where the incredible anomaly resides. The system in question, TOI-1338b, was discovered by a student using the Transiting Exoplanet Study Satellite, known as TESS, spotting a celestial body roughly the size of Saturn, with a significantly reduced mass. BEBOP-1c is the first planet of its kind to be discovered using radial velocity, which measures mass based on the amount the planet wobbles as it orbits, offering scientists a quick and efficient way to estimate mass.
As Standing explained while speaking with a Space.com representative, these new techniques are having a huge impact on modern science and society, proving that anyone with a good understanding of the mathematics needed to interpret their findings can make bold new discoveries without to rely on incredibly expensive and complex machinery unavailable to the general public. Although early estimates suggest that the gas giant is probably uninhabitable for any known life form, the planet Tatooine would certainly be a beautiful place for any living creature to capture a picturesque sunset.