Tatooine tagged posts

Astronomers have developed the most realistic model to date of planet formation in binary star systems.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge and the Max Planck Institute for Extra-terrestrial Physics, have shown how exoplanets in binary star systems—such as the ‘Tatooine’ planets spotted by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope—came into being without being destroyed in their chaotic birth environment.

They studied a type of binary system where the smaller companion star orbits the larger parent star approximately once every 100 years—our nearest neighbour, Alpha Centauri, is an example of such a system.

“A system like this would be the equivalent of a second Sun where Uranus is, which would have made our own solar system look very different,” said co-author Dr...

NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft operating in a new mission profile called K2. Credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T Pyle Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-08-astronomers-tenth-transiting-tatooine.html#jCp

Astronomers at the 29th International Astronomical Union General Assembly will announce on Aug 14 the discovery of a new transiting “circumbinary” planet, bringing the number of such known planets into double digits. A circumbinary planet orbits 2 stars, and like the fictional planet “Tatooine” from Star Wars, this planet has two suns in its sky. The discovery marks an important milestone and comes only 4 years after the first Kepler circumbinary planet was detected...