Star Wars Planets For Real
Written by The Night Sky Guy on January 14, 2012 – 4:14 pm -
It seems that an alien planet from the fantasy world of Hollywood might be more real than we thought. Coming only a day after astronomers at major scientific conference announced that worlds with two suns can be Earthlike, a new study now suggests our galaxy alone holds millions of “Tatooines”—nicknamed after the Star Wars planet with two suns.
Many of us remember that Star Wars scene where Luke Skywalker is walking on his home world of Tatooine and looks off into the sunset and there’s not one but TWO suns sinking towards the horizon. Well now scientists have found three such bizzare planets- each with a pair of orbiting suns.Using the Kepler Space Telescope, a team of astronomers now believe that double-sun worlds are common across the universe and may represent an entirely new class of worlds, called circumbinary planets.
How did the planet hunters come to this startling conclusion and what does this mean for our search for sister Earths? Read the rest of my story at National Geographic News
Tags: exoplanets, Kepler space telescope, Star Wars, Tatooine
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