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The alien planet with two suns, as in the "Star Wars" films, will be visible Scientists have spotted a real-life Tatooine — a world with two suns, like Luke Skywalker's home planet in the "Star Wars" films — and you should be able to see this alien star system, too, using a good pair of binoculars. Astronomers announced the discovery of the alien planet, called Kepler-16b, Thursday. The Saturn-mass planet orbits a pair of stars known as Kepler-16A and Kepler-16B. Someone on Kepler-16b would see two suns hanging near each other in the sky, just as Luke did on Tatooine.

Kepler-16b Artist’s impression of Kepler-16b, the first planet known to definitively orbit two stars – what’s called a circumbinary planet. The planet, which can be seen in the foreground, was discovered by NASA’s Kepler mission. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle ********************************************************************************* Study proves ground-based telescopes can search for planets with two suns. Astronomers have used a new technique to confirm a real-life Tatooine, the fictional planet with two suns that was home to Luke Skywalker in “Star Wars.” The planet, Kepler-16b, is about 245 light years from Earth, is a gas giant, and is roughly the size of Saturn. Scientists already knew...

Artist’s impression of the newly discovered candidate planet in orbit around Proxima Centauri, with Alpha Centauri A and B in the background.Image: ESO/L. Calçada Proxima Centauri, a tiny star located a mere 4.25 light-years from Earth, may host a third planet, according to new research. The nearest star to Earth is a surprisingly busy place, or at least it’s looking that way. Astronomers have announced the discovery of a candidate planet around Proxima Centauri, adding to the two already known to orbit the star. Astronomer João Faria from the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences in Portugal is the lead...

A physics problem that has plagued science since the days of Isaac Newton is closer to being solved, say a pair of Israeli researchers. The duo used "the drunkard's walk" to calculate the outcome of a cosmic dance between three massive objects, or the so-called three-body problem. For physicists, predicting the motion of two massive objects, like a pair of stars, is a piece of cake. But when a third object enters the picture, the problem becomes unsolvable. That's because when two massive objects get close to each other, their gravitational attraction influences the paths they take in a way...

Microlensing strikes again. Astronomers have been using the technique to detect everything from rogue planets to the most distant star ever seen. Now, astronomers have officially found another elusive object that has long been theorized, and that Universe Today first reported on back in 2009 but has never directly detected – a rogue black hole. That detection comes at the end of a 6-year observational campaign, with dozens of authors collaborating on a paper recently published in arXiv (meaning it has not yet been peer-reviewed). Those six years of painstakingly gathered data all started back in 2011, when a star...

Pluto is a dwarf planet. A dwarf planet travels around, or orbits, the sun just like other planets. But it is much smaller. Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in 1930. He was an astronomer from the United States. An astronomer is a scientist who studies stars and other objects in space. Venetia Burney named Pluto that same year. She was an 11-year-old girl from England. Pluto is not very big. It is only half as wide as the United States. Pluto is smaller than Earth's moon. This dwarf planet takes 248 Earth years to go around the sun. If you lived...

The hunt for moons outside our solar system has just turned up another possible lunar world, a moon bigger than Earth that's orbiting a Jupiter-like planet. The planet and its moon — if it really is a moon — orbit a Sun-like star that's over 5,000 light years away, according to a report in the journal Nature Astronomy. "The moon is pretty alien compared to any moon in the solar system," says David Kipping, an astronomer at Columbia University. "We're not sure if it's rocky, we're not sure if it's gaseous. It's kind of in between the size of Neptune,...

The US experts want to know how interstellar space travel affects the microscopic animals, known for an ability to survive extreme conditions including in outer space. In a new paper, they've proposed building small space probes containing tardigrades, also known as 'water bears', that would travel at up to 30 per cent the speed of light into space. These probes would be propelled by laser light instead of rocket fuel, from a laser array stationed on Earth, or possibly the moon. At speeds of roughly 100 million miles per hour, tardigrades would reach the next solar system, Proxima Centauri, in...

Heavenly bodies stir up routine catastrophes March 18 2003 at 01:30PM By Graeme Addison Legend has it that when two people get together and er... bond, the Earth will move – at least in a metaphorical sense. Likewise, it takes two heavenly bodies, an impactor and a target, to come together with Earth-shattering force to form a crater. There’s nothing dreamlike about this: it happens, frequently, throughout the solar system. Impact catastrophes are routine. Just over two-billion years ago, a chunk of asteroid at least the size of Table Mountain struck the landmass that is now South Africa. It hurtled...

A summary of decades of research on a rather 'out-there' idea involving viruses from space raises questions on just how scientific we can be when it comes to speculating on the history of life on Earth. It's easy to throw around words like crackpot, rogue, and maverick in describing the scientific fringe, but then papers like this one, from 2018, come along and leave us blinking owlishly, unsure of where to even begin. A total of 33 names were listed as authors on this review, which was published by Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology back in August 2018. The...

Interstellar space is a graveyard of lost souls. Adrift far from any star, these planets float in the darkness like ghost ships in the night. Catching sight of one requires patience, and a good eye. But a new approach based on tens of thousands of images collected by the European Southern Observatory's facilities has resulted in the identification of as many as 170 potential 'rogue' worlds in our corner of the galaxy. If a good fraction of them are confirmed to be planets, it would suggest the Milky Way is swarming with solar exiles. "There could be several billions of...

The number of known exoplanets made a big jump up in November 2021, when astronomers announced a whopping 301 newly confirmed planets and an additional 366 new planet candidates. NASA’s Kepler planet-hunter – a space observatory – gathered the data. Kepler launched and began operations in 2009. It ran out of fuel and was retired in late 2018. But astronomers are still mining the mission’s data, making new discoveries of distant worlds... Overall, the Kepler mission was immensely successful. As of December 6, 2021, astronomers recognize 4,888 confirmed exoplanets. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Kepler single-handedly discovered most...

Explanation: It's not the big disk that's attracting the most attention. Although the big planet-forming disk around the star PDS 70 is clearly imaged and itself quite interesting. It's also not the planet on the right, just inside the big disk, that’s being talked about the most. Although the planet PDS 70c is a newly formed and, interestingly, similar in size and mass to Jupiter. It's the fuzzy patch around the planet PDS 70c that's causing the commotion. That fuzzy patch is thought to be itself a dusty disk that is now forming into moons -- and that has never...

Habitable Planets With Earth-Like Biospheres May Be Much Rarer Than Thought TOPICS:AstrobiologyAstronomyAstrophysicsExoplanetRoyal Astronomical SocietyBy Royal Astronomical Society June 26, 2021A new analysis of known exoplanets has revealed that Earth-like conditions on potentially habitable planets may be much rarer than previously thought. The work focuses on the conditions required for oxygen-based photosynthesis to develop on a planet, which would enable complex biospheres of the type found on Earth. The study was recently published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.The number of confirmed planets in our own Milky Way galaxy now numbers into the thousands. However, planets that are...

Astronomers have long been looking into the vast universe in hopes of discovering alien civilisations. But for a planet to have life, liquid water must be present. The chances of that finding scenario have seemed impossible to calculate because it has been the assumption that planets like Earth get their water by chance if a large, ice asteroid hits the planet. Now, researchers from the GLOBE Institute at the University of Copenhagen have published an eye-opening study, indicating that water may be present during the very formation of a planet. According to the study's calculations, this is true for both...

This surprising orbital architecture was caused by the protoplanetary disk in which the two planets formed being tilted by the second star in this system. "In any planetary system, the planets are thought to form in a spinning, circular disk of material that swirls around a young star for a few million years after the star itself is born, the so-called protoplanetary disk. Usually, the disk and the star are spinning the same way. However, if there is a neighboring star (where 'neighboring' in astronomy means within a light-year or so), the gravitational force from the neighboring star might tilt...

WASP-12b is one of the more interesting exoplanets we know of. Orbiting a yellow dwarf star a little bigger than the Sun 1,410 light-years away, the ultra-black planet is what's known as a "hot Jupiter" - a gas giant exoplanet with similar mass and size to Jupiter, but so close to the star that it's scorching hot. WASP-12b has never exactly been in the most secure position. With an orbital period of just over a day, the gas giant exoplanet is so close to its star that a constant stream of material is being siphoned away from its atmosphere. But...

A Russian astronomer observed the planets thru a telescope made of ice. Henry describes his observations. Ever wondered what the opinion of equality of the sexes was in 1789? Henry's position is that "Love, and all its delectable concomitants was utterly unknown there [on Venus]; as that passion exists but where equality is found or understood." Interesting?

The most common type of star in the galaxy is the red dwarf star. None of these small, dim stars can be seen from Earth with the naked eye, but they can emit flares far more powerful than anything our Sun emits. Two astronomers using the Hubble space telescope saw a red dwarf star give off a powerful type of flare called a superflare. That’s bad news for any planets in these stars’ so-called habitable zones. Red dwarfs make up about 75% of the stars in the Milky Way, so they probably host many exoplanets. In fact, scientists think most...

For centuries, human beings have wondered about the possibility of other Earths orbiting distant stars. Perhaps some of these alien worlds would harbor strange forms of life or have unique and telling histories or futures. But it was only in 1995 that astronomers spotted the first planets orbiting sunlike stars outside of our solar system. In the last decade, in particular, the number of planets known to orbit distant stars grew from under 100 to well over 2,000, with another 2,000 likely planets awaiting confirmation. Most of these new discoveries are due to a single endeavor—NASA's Kepler mission. Kepler is...