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NASA Discovers New 'Tatooine' Planet With Two Suns
By Chloe Albanesius
September 16, 2011 12:55pm EST
First we get the Back to the Future sneakers and now Tatooine? It's a big week for sci-fi movie buffs, as NASA on Thursday revealed that its Kepler mission had uncovered evidence of a circumbinary planet, or a planet that orbits two stars.
As Star Wars fans will know, and as PCMag analyst Tony Hoffman pointed out this week, the discovery is reminiscent of Tatooine, the planet on which Luke Skywalker grew up, which circled a double star, or two suns that appeared close together in the sky.
But before you pack up your things in hopes of living the life of a Jedi, NASA said the planet it has discovered is cold, gaseous, and not thought to contain life. It's about the size of Saturn and scientists think it's made up of half rock and half gas. Of the two stars, meanwhile, one is 69 percent the mass of our sun while the other is 20 percent.
But discovery of this system, dubbed Kepler-16, is significant because we've never before had actual proof of circumbinary planets.
"This discovery confirms a new class of planetary systems that could harbor life," Kepler principal investigator William Borucki said in a statement. "Given that most stars in our galaxy are part of a binary system, this means the opportunities for life are much broader than if planets form only around single stars. This milestone discovery confirms a theory that scientists have had for decades but could not prove until now."
The planet, known as Kepler-16b, orbits around both stars every 229 days, similar to Venus' 225 day orbit. But NASA said it ∃ beyond a zone where liquid water could exist on the surface, because the stars are cooler than our sun.
The research team was led by Laurance Doyle of the SETI Institute, (which was featured in the movie Contact and recently revived its alien research thanks to donations). The SETI team used data from the Kepler space telescope, which measures dips in brightness for more than 15,000 stars in the hopes of finding transiting planets.
"When the smaller star partially blocks the larger star, a primary eclipse occurs, and a secondary eclipse occurs when the smaller star is occulted, or completely blocked, by the larger star," NASA said. "Astronomers further observed that the brightness of the system dipped even when the stars were not eclipsing one another, hinting at a third body."
John Knoll, the visual effects supervisor for Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), the company founded by George Lucas that produced the special effects for the Star Wars movies, was in attendance at Thursday's announcement. "Working in film, we often are tasked with creating something never before seen. However, more often than not, scientific discoveries prove to be more spectacular than anything we dare imagine," he said in a statement. "There is no doubt these discoveries influence and inspire storytellers. Their very existence serves as cause to dream bigger and open our minds to new possibilities beyond what we think we 'know.'"
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2393115,00.asp
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