Star wars? Scientists find a Tatooine-style exoplanet with two suns

In the universe of the Star Wars series, Jedi Luke Skywalker’s home planet Tatooine has two suns, but that doesn’t seem to happen only in fiction. A team of British scientists used data from space telescopes to detect it. exoplanetOrbiting Planets are called Binary Files Escorted by 1c (BEBOP-1c), It is located in a binary system with two suns.

Researchers used data from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and the Very Large Telescope (VLT) to determine the mass of exoplanet TOI-1338b, but eventually discovered a second planet in the region. The newly found exoplanet is located about 1,320 light-years from Earth in the constellation Pictor.

According to the details of the study published in the scientific journal Nature Astronomy, BEBOP-1c is a gas giant that takes up to 215 days to complete one orbit around the sun. Scientists claim that it has a mass 65 times that of Earth and about 5 times smaller than that of Jupiter.

“With only 15 of these binary planets known out of a total of more than 5,200 exoplanets discovered so far, it’s exciting to be a part of this emerging exoplanet science. Matthew Standing, lead author of the study and Open University astrophysicist, told Space. “Our results show that binary planets appear to exist as frequently as planets around individual stars, such as our sun.”

The suns are 79% of an astronomical unit (AU) from the exoplanet – the astronomical unit is the average distance between the Earth and the Sun.

Tatooine or just an exoplanet?

According to scientists, BEBOP-1c was the first binary exoplanet to be detected using the radial velocity technique alone, capable of detecting the gravitational pull of planets. Although the discovery took place during the pandemic caused by Covid-19, observatories were closed and research was delayed for a year.

In any case, the researchers cautioned that using the radial velocity technique to detect circular planets is not that simple, because sunlight can interfere with data collection. In the case of the BEBOP-1c, the secondary star is much smaller and dimmer so the signals are not mixed.

According to study co-author and University of Birmingham astrophysicist Amaury Triaud, the team is collecting data from telescopes in France and Chile to look for more circular planets. The goal is to find data, among other things, to understand how often these binary systems occur, whether they tend to be equal to or larger than planets with individual stars.