Washington: When the day ends on planet Kepler-16b there is a double sunset, Science journal says.
US astronomers said they have discovered the first planet that is orbiting two Suns, much like the fictional home of Luke Skywalker featured in Star Wars.
Skywalker's native planet of Tatooine was hot and desert-like, but this planet, called Kepler-16b, is a freezing cold world about the size of Saturn, orbiting two parent Suns in a near perfect circle about 200 light years away.
Eccentric orbit
The planet was glimpsed with the US space agency's Kepler space telescope, which monitors the brightness of 155,000 stars, according to the research published in Science.
If there were people on Kepler-16b, they could relax to the view of a double sunset, but such a scenario is highly unlikely due to the planet's extreme frigid surface temperature of -73 to -101 Celsius (-100 to -150 Fahrenheit). The chill is likely due to the fact that even though the planet has two Suns which it orbits every 229 days at a distance of 105 million kilometres, they are smaller and cooler than our single Sun. One of Kepler-16b's Suns is 20 per cent as massive as ours, and the other is 69 per cent as massive.
While the planet orbits them, the two Suns dance with each other in an "eccentric 41-day orbit," the study said.
"This discovery is stunning," said co-author Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution for Science Department of Terrestrial Magnetism.
"Once again, what used to be science fiction has turned into reality."
While astronomers have previously glimpsed planets they believed were orbiting two stars, they had never before seen one actually passing in front of its two Suns so this discovery offers the first proof.
Kepler's mission is to scour our section of the Milky Way galaxy for Earth-like planets in the so-called "habitable zone" that is not too close and not too far away from the stars they orbit.
