In 1977, filmmaker George Lucas imagined what astronomers have now discovered: A planet with twin suns.
In one of the most iconic images in “Star Wars,” hero Luke Skywalker broods as double suns set on the desert world Tatooine. Anyone on the newly found planet Kepler 16B would enjoy a similar stunning sight.
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Unlike Tatooine, though, Kepler 16B is unlikely to host any heroes. Roughly the size of Saturn, the planet has no real surface and, instead, seems to be made of an icy, rocky core surrounded by hydrogen and helium gas. The planet is too cold for liquid water, with an average surface temperature about 100 degrees below that of Earth’s.
Astronomers have caught hints of planets circling double stars before, but Kepler 16B marks the first solid detection of such a world — one locked in a dramatic dance with its suns.
The two stars, about 200 light years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus, circle each other every 41 days. One star is small, red and dim, throwing off just 20 percent of the light of our sun. The other star, bigger and orange, generates about 70 percent of the light of our sun.
Kepler 16B circles them both, taking 229 days to complete an orbit. As it does, it passes in front of each star, blocking a small fraction of their light. NASA’s Kepler space telescope detected the dips in brightness.
As the two stars twirl about each other, they would appear to grow closer and farther apart in the sky of Kepler 16B. About every 20 days, the twin suns would rise and set together. In between, the two stars would appear to drift apart.
Astronomers say double, or binary, stars are as common in our galaxy as solitary stars like our sun.
A team led by Laurance Doyle of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., describe the discovery in the journal Science.
“Nobody has ever seen a place like this before,” Doyle said at a news conference.
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