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Tatooine Planets Found: Nearly 30 New Worlds Discovered!
4 May
Summary
- Astronomers identified 27 new potential circumbinary planets.
- New planets orbit two stars, similar to Star Wars' Tatooine.
- A new method using stellar eclipse timing led to discovery.
Astronomers have announced the discovery of 27 new candidate planets that orbit binary star systems, a celestial arrangement familiar from the Star Wars universe as the setting for Tatooine. This finding significantly expands the catalog of known circumbinary planets, which orbit two stars simultaneously.
Previously, detecting these planets relied on observing transits, where a planet passing in front of a star causes a dip in its brightness. This method requires precise alignment with Earth.
The research team employed a more advanced technique: observing "apsidal precession," which involves monitoring subtle wobbles and shifts in the timing of eclipses between two stars in a binary system.
This method identified 36 star systems with anomalies that could indicate a third body. Of these, 27 show characteristics consistent with planet-mass objects, though further spectral analysis is needed for confirmation.
These potential circumbinary planets, discovered using data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, range in size from Neptune-like to ten times the mass of Jupiter. Their environments are expected to be extreme, unlike anything within our solar system.
The discovery highlights that a significant portion of stars in the universe exist in multiple star systems, suggesting that circumbinary planets may be more common than previously thought.
