Real-Life Tatooine: Kepler-34 B and Kepler-35 B Have Two Suns

The amazing discoveries from the Kepler mission just keep on coming.

Astronomers have now found more real-life versions of Tatooine, Luke Skywalker’s home planet in the “Star Wars” saga.  These worlds have twin suns that rise and set each day as opposed to just one.

These two new exoplanets are also very close to the habitable zones of their parent stars.

The discovery is sure to help scientists take a stab at just how many binary star systems have planets.

Astronomers used NASA‘s Kepler space telescope to discover the two new “circumbinary planets” amid 750 systems they sampled. This latest finding brings the total number of confirmed double-sun worlds to three.

Both new planets are low-density gas giants located around distant pairs of stars.

The first exoplanet, Kepler-34 b, is about 22 percent of the mass of the planet Jupiter and 76 percent the width of the red giant. Kepler-34 b orbits two stars once every 289 days at approximately the same distance as Earth is from the sun. The planet is about 4,900 light-years away from Earth.

The second exoplanet, Kepler-35 b, orbits two stars that are 5,400 light-years from Earth. It has about 13 percent the mass of Jupiter and is 73 percent as wide. It orbits twin stars once every 131 days from a distance about 60 percent that of Earth from our sun.

“With only three circumbinary planets known, we are already very close to that special ‘Goldilocks’ zone,” study lead author William Welsh, an astronomer at San Diego State University, said of the discovery. “It is my opinion that circumbinary planets in the habitable zone will turn out to be fairly common, and that is exciting.”

The scientists presented their work today (Wednesday) at the 219th American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas and detailed their findings in this week’s edition of the journal Nature.

Related articles

• Real-Life ‘Tatooine’: New ‘Star Wars’-Like Planets with 2 Suns Found (space.com)
• Tatooine-like planets may be common (arstechnica.com)
• More ‘Tattooine’ planets with twin suns discovered (mnn.com)
• Two more Tattooine-like planets discovered orbiting double suns [Video] (io9.com)