WHILE Luke Skywalker peered at the two suns of his desert planet pondering his future as a Jedi, scientists peered back into the night sky wondering if such a planet could exist in the known universe and not just in a galaxy far far away.
Scientists have just confirmed that they’ve found such a planet and it’s called Kepler-16b.
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The exoplanet was spotted by a ground-based telescope located at an observatory in southeast France.
Professor Amaury Triaud, who led the team that found Kepler-16b, said: “It is difficult to understand how circumbinary planets can exist.
“That’s because the presence of two stars interferes with the protoplanetary disc, and this prevents dust from agglomerating into planets.”
Triaud theorized: “The planet may have formed far from the two stars, where their influence is weaker, and then moved inwards in a process called disc-driven migration – or, alternatively, we may find we need to revise our understanding of the process of planetary accretion.”
that do push up against the traditional understanding of planet formation.
In 2019, a high school-aged intern named Wolf Cukier flagged what he thought was an eclipse.
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Upon further investigation from his peers working on NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), it turned out to be the first plant orbiting two stars discovered by the TESS program.
TESS would later discover a planet orbiting three suns in an extremely rare triple-star system.
Exoplanets, planets outside Earth’s solar system, existed only in theory starting in 1917.
The theory was confirmed in 1992 when astronomers Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail discovered two planets 2,300 lightyears away.
Exoplanet.eu, a running catalog of all confirmed exoplanet discoveries, has nearly 5,000 entries to date.
The two planets Wolszczan and Frail discovered orbit a pulsar–the core of a collapsed star much larger than the Sun that supports the Milky Way.
Three years later, the first exoplanet orbiting a Sun comparable to ours was discovered.
The planet, Pegasi 51 b, experiences temperatures in excess of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit due to its proximity to its star.
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In other news, a huge explosion on the Sun could have been ‘catastrophic’ for Earth’s power grid, experts have warned.
Elon Musk has long been vocal about his ambitions for colonizing Mars – here’s everything we know about his plan.
And, astronomers have observed a red giant star dying in real-time for the first time ever.
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