Star Wars predicted it: Planet discovered that orbits two suns like Luke Skywalkers home Tatooine

Is it a two-for-sun deal.Astronomers were blown away after discovering a bizarre exoplanet that orbits twin stars closer than any ever seen before in a binary star system, per a starry study published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics.”Researchers with Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, released a time-lapse showing the planet orbiting around the luminous two-fer, which has been compared to the twin suns over Tattooine — the home planet of Luke Skywalker in “Star Wars.”Dubbed HD 143811 AB b, the interstellar entity is a gas giant that’s located some 446 light-years away from Earth in a galaxy far, far away, Space.com reported.However, it is reportedly six times closer to its twin light sources than any binary system exoplanet imaged prior, offering researchers the rare opportunity to analyze the trajectory of the planets and stars in this system.“Of the 6,000 exoplanets that we know of, only a very small fraction of them orbit binaries,” team member and exoplanet imaging expert Jason Wang of Northwestern University said in a statement regarding the solar double header.“Of those, we only have a direct image of a handful of them, meaning we can have an image of the binary and the planet itself.” He added, “Imaging both the planet and the binary is interesting because it’s the only type of planetary system where we can trace both the orbit of the binary star and the planet in the sky at the same time.”Despite its relative proximity to its suns compared to other exoplanets, HD 143811 AB b is still 80 times further from its light sources than Earth is from the Sun.

That means that it takes the planet 300 years to finish a single revolution around the sun, even while the binary stars race orbit each other once every 18 days.The planet is also a whopper — reportedly six times the size of fellow gas ball Jupiter.Coincidentally, HD 143811 AB is not a new discovery.Rather, it was brought to light, er lights, after Wang and...