Just like Tatooine in ‘Star Wars’: Scientists discover a planet with two suns

For generations, impressions of extraterrestrial exploration have been colored by the otherworldly representations on Star Wars. But now, researchers may have found something with an uncanny likeness to the franchise’s fictional universe.

Star Wars fans will be well aware of Tatooine, the desolate, distant world inhabited by human settlers. In the films Tatooine orbits two stars and scientists from the Northwestern University in Chicago have found something remarkably similar.

A new study published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics describes a new planet named ‘HD 143811 AB b’ in a distant galaxy. The planet is a gas giant located around 446 light-years away from Earth and it boasts twin light sources, much like the fictional Tatooine.

Although other twin-star planets have been found in the past, Space.com reports that the new discovery is six times closer to those light sources than any other example. This unique configuration could give scientists the chance to study, in greater detail, how stars and planets orbit together.

“Of the 6,000 exoplanets that we know of, only a very small fraction of them orbit binaries,” Jason Wang of Northwestern University said in a statement. “Of those, we only have a direct image of a handful of them, meaning we can have an image of the binary and the planet itself. Imaging both the planet and the binary is interesting because it’s the only type of planetary system where we can trace both the orbit of the binary star and the planet in the sky at the same time.”

This exoplanet was formed 50 million years after the death of the dinosaurs, making it very young in cosmic terms. The discovery was made by Wang and his team using data collected almost 10 years ago by the Gemini South telescope.

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