NASA’s Kepler Telescope Finds Planet Orbiting Two Stars

Look toward Cygnus and Lyra, and you're looking toward the giant gaseous planet Kepler 16b, which has been nicknamed Tatooine after the Star Wars films. While outside of the Goldilocks zone and uninhabitable, sci-fi becomes pure science in this first direct discovery of such a solar system structure.

From double sunrise to double sunset the show goes on, always changing.

Sometimes the orange sun rises first. Sometimes it is the red one, although they are never far apart in the sky and you can see them moving around each other, casting double shadows across the firmament and periodically crossing right in front of each other.

Such is life, if it were possible, on the latest addition to the pantheon of weird planets now known to exist outside the bounds of our own solar system. It is the first planet, astronomers say, that has been definitely shown to be orbiting two stars at once, circling the pair — which themselves orbit each other tightly — at a distance of some 65 million miles.

A team of astronomers using NASA’s Kepler planet-hunting spacecraft announced the discovery on Thursday in a paper published online in the journal Science, in a talk at a conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo., and in a news conference at NASA’s Ames Research Laboratory in Mountain View, Calif., Kepler’s headquarters.

The official name of the new planet is Kepler 16b, but astronomers are already referring to it informally as Tatooine, after the home planet of Luke and Anakin Skywalker in the George Lucas “Star Wars” movies, which also had two suns.

More: NASA’s Kepler Telescope Finds Planet Orbiting Two Stars - NYTimes.com