Nearly 30 Star Wars Tatooine-like planets present in ground-breaking examine
Astronomers have flagged 27 potential “Tatooine-like” worlds orbiting two suns in a new satellite survey, a discovery that could indicate thousands more twin-star planets are still waiting to be found
A new satellite search has reportedly identified 27 unusual worlds that orbit two suns rather than one, just like Tatooine, the fictional Star Wars home planet of Luke Skywalker(Image: Lucas Films)
Astronomers have found almost 30 potential planets orbiting two suns, a haul that could point to thousands more hiding in plain sight.
A new satellite search has identified 27 unusual worlds that orbit two suns rather than one like Tatooine, the fictional Star Wars home planet of Luke Skywalker. These so-called circumbinary planets were reportedly once considered science fiction, with just 18 known examples until now.
A stark contrast compared with the more than 6,000 confirmed planets found around single stars. But a new survey has now flagged 27 possible circumbinary planets in a single sweep, thanks to a different way of hunting for them.
Margo Thorton, a PhD candidate from the University of New South Wales explained: “Most of our current knowledge on planets is biased, based on how we’ve looked for them. We’ve mostly found the easiest ones to detect.
“This new method could help us uncover a large population of hidden planets, especially those that don’t line up perfectly from our line of sight. It could help reveal what the true population of planets in our universe is.”
Thorton is the author of a new study on the discovery published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Independent reported. The technique has previously been used to study pairs of stars orbiting each other, but not as a large-scale planet search tool.
It works by observing how the orbits of binary stars shift over long timescales, according to the Independent. Scientists then reportedly measure changes in the timing of the stars’ eclipses, which can hint that another object is tugging on their orbits.
They can potentially be in turn a planet. These eclipses show up as small dips in the light detected on Earth, suggesting something else may be present in the system, as per the Independent. To follow the stars’ movements, researchers analysed data from Nasa’s Tessspace telescope, launched in 2018 to hunt for exoplanets.
“I’m excited about the potential for how many planets we could find with this method,” astronomer Ben Montet from UNSW said. Thornton added: “With this method so far, we have 27 strong planet candidates in environments completely unlike our own solar system.”
As researchers found 27 unconfirmed planet candidates, from Neptune-sized to 10 times Jupiter’s mass, among 1,590 binary star systems, there could be thousands more still to discover.
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