NASA's Kepler telescope has spotted a planet that is sure to revive memories of Star Wars — it orbits two stars, like Tatooine, the fictional home planet of Luke Skywalker.
Laurance Doyle at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and his team looked for the slight dimming of light that occurs when a planet passes in front of its parent star. But for the planet Kepler-16b, they detected four instances of dimming. Two occurred when the stars crossed each other, and two much smaller ones were caused by the planet, which is about the size of Saturn, moving in front of each star. The stars' masses are about 20% and 69% that of the Sun, and orbit each other every 41 days. The planet has a nearly circular 229-day orbit.
The authors suggest that, rather than being captured, the planet formed from the same dust and gas as the two stars — a novel situation that challenges some models of solar system formation.
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A planet with two suns. Nature 477, 373 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/477373a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/477373a
