Tatooine

Planet with Two Suns Discovered; Sadly Not Tatooine

  • First Posted: Sep 15 2011 15:56 PM
  • Updated: 6 minutes ago

Double sunset, all the way!

Every Star Wars fan's lifelong dream has come true (no, not the Leia in a bikini scene): NASA's Kepler telescope has discovered a planet with two suns, just like Luke Skywalker's desolate home planet of Tatooine. Kepler-16B, as the planet is now named, is a cold, gaseous giant similar to Saturn, but its two suns make it the only known planet with such a distinction. Sadly, though, since it doesn't appear to be habitable, and it's 200 light years away, there's no chance of wannabe-Jedis ever standing on its surface to stare at the double sunset while pondering how to get off the planet to join the Rebellion before their aunts and uncles get killed by Tusken raiders (those can't be Tusken raiders... only Imperial stormtroopers are so precise). The two stars, one a K dwarf about two-thirds the size of our sun, the other a red dwarf about a fifth the size of the sun, orbit each other while Kepler-16B (screw it, we're calling this mother Tatooine henceforth) orbits from a safe 105 million kilometres away in the aptly named Kepler-16 system.

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