Finding Tatooine: Planet discovered that orbits 2 suns
Forget Nemo or Dory. Scientists have found a planet that's similar to Tatooine, home of Luke Skywalker.
The planet — with the unwieldy name of Kepler-1647b — is the largest one yet discovered that orbits two suns. These planets are known as "circumbinary" planets.
Astronomers from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and San Diego State University used the Kepler Space Telescope to locate the planet. The discovery was announced Monday at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in San Diego.
A study about the discovery has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.
Using the telescope, astronomers look for subtle dips in brightness that hint a planet might be moving in front of a star, blocking a small portion of the star's light.
"Finding circumbinary planets is much harder than finding planets around single stars,” said SDSU astronomer William Welsh, one of the paper’s coauthors.
"The transits are not regularly spaced in time and they can vary in duration and even depth," Welsh said in a statement.
Researchers crowd-sourced to confirm the planet's existence by using a worldwide network of professional and amateur astronomers.
The planet's "year" is just over 3 Earth years. And although the planet's orbit puts it within the so-called habitable zone, it's a gas giant like Jupiter so is unlikely to host life.
Kepler-1647b is 3,700 light years away and is about 4.4 billion years old, about the same age as Earth. It's in the constellation Cygnus and cannot be seen with the naked eye.
