Washington, Sept 16 (ANI): NASA's Kepler space telescope has discovered a Saturn-size world orbiting two stars - what's called a circumbinary planet - just like Tatooine, Luke Skywalker's home world in the Star Wars films.
However, the newly discovered planet - Kepler-16b - is colder than a desert world.
Like Tatooine, Kepler-16b enjoys a double sunset as it circles a pair of stars approximately 200 light-years from Earth. It's not thought to harbor life, but its discovery demonstrates the diversity of planets in our galaxy.
"Kepler-16b is the first confirmed, unambiguous example of a circumbinary planet - a planet orbiting not one, but two stars," said Josh Carter of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).
"Once again, we're finding that our solar system is only one example of the variety of planetary systems Nature can create."
Kepler-16b weighs about a third as much as Jupiter and has a radius three-fourths that of Jupiter, making it similar to Saturn in both size and mass. It orbits its two parent stars every 229 days at a distance of 65 million miles - similar to Venus' 225-day orbit.
Both stars are smaller and cooler than our Sun. As a result, Kepler-16b is quite cold, with a surface temperature of around -100 to - 150 degree Fahrenheit.
Though there have been past hints of the existence of other planets that circled double stars, scientists said this is the first confirmation.
"Much of what we know about the sizes of stars comes from such eclipsing binary systems, and most of what we know about the size of planets comes from transits," said lead author and Kepler scientist Laurance Doyle of the SETI Institute. "Kepler-16 combines the best of both worlds, with stellar eclipses and planetary transits in one system."
The study was recently published in the journal Science. (ANI)
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