Star Wars exoplanet that gets TWO sunsets a day spotted by astronomers… – The Sun

WHILE Luke Skywalker peered at the two suns of his desert planet pondering his future as a Jedi, scientists peered back into the night sky wondering if such a planet could exist in the known universe and not just in a galaxy far far away.

Scientists have just confirmed that they've found such a planet and it's called Kepler-16b.

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The exoplanet was spotted by a ground-based telescope located at an observatory in southeast France.

Professor Amaury Triaud, who led the team that found Kepler-16b, said: It is difficult to understand how circumbinary planets can exist.

"Thats because the presence of two stars interferes with the protoplanetary disc, and this prevents dust from agglomerating into planets.

Triaud theorized: The planet may have formed far from the two stars, where their influence is weaker, and then moved inwards in a process called disc-driven migration or, alternatively, we may find we need to revise our understanding of the process of planetary accretion.

that do push up against the traditional understanding of planet formation.

In 2019, a high school-aged intern named Wolf Cukier flagged what he thought was an eclipse.

Upon further investigation from his peers working on NASAs Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), it turned out to be the first plant orbiting two stars discovered by the TESS program.

TESS would later discover a planet orbiting three suns in an extremely rare triple-star system.

Exoplanets, planets outside Earths solar system, existed only in theory starting in 1917.

The theory was confirmed in 1992 when astronomers Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail discovered two planets 2,300 lightyears away.

Exoplanet.eu, a running catalog of all confirmed exoplanet discoveries, has nearly 5,000 entries to date.

The two planets Wolszczan and Frail discovered orbit a pulsarthe core of a collapsed star much larger than the Sun that supports the Milky Way.

Three years later, the first exoplanet orbiting a Sun comparable to ours was discovered.

The planet, Pegasi 51 b, experiences temperatures in excess of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit due to its proximity to its star.

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Star Wars exoplanet that gets TWO sunsets a day spotted by astronomers... - The Sun