Exoplanets with two suns, like Tatooine

But does a planet like Tattooine really exist?

In the famous sci-fi saga “Star Wars”, Tattoine is a desert world orbiting a binary star, the home planet of the Skywalker family.

Worlds of this type are called “circumbinary” and orbit two stars instead of one. The two stars orbit each other, in a binary system, while the planet typically orbits further from the centre of the system than either of the two stars.

One of the best known circumbinary planets, and one of the earliest observed examples of this type, is Kepler-16b, about 200 light years from us. It has a mass similar to Saturn and orbits its stars, a red dwarf and an orange dwarf, in just under a year.

After Kepler-16b, other planets were found revolving around two stars, such as Kepler-34b and Kepler-35b.

The fascination caused by these systems is great: imagine the rising and setting of two different suns, on a world like Tatooine... a vision that reminds us how capable the Universe is of surprising us!