Planet has two suns, like Luke Skywalker’s home planet
NASA’s Kepler telescope has discovered a huge, frigid planet that circles two different stars. This is the first time a world has been discovered that orbits two stars, the Guardian reports, although the scenario was famously imagined on arid desert planet Tatooine, Luke Skywalker’s home planet, in the famous Star Wars trilogies. This new planet, named Kepler-16b, is about 200 light years from Earth and has a similar mass to Saturn in our solar system. Temperatures on the planet are likely drop as low as –100 C, where an observer could see two small suns rise and set together, occasionally passing in front of each other. Alan Boss, a member of the team that made the discovery, called the discovery stunning. “Once again,” said Boss, “what used to be science fiction has turned into reality.”