Astronomers have discovered 27 new potential planets, orbiting two stars instead of one that mirrors the fictional desert planet Tatooine. Star Wars universe.
So far, only 18 planets orbiting two stars are known, compared to the more than 6,000 planets orbiting a single star.
A new study conducted by researchers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) found potential 30 circumbinary candidates using new methodology.
According to findings, which coincide with Star Wars Today, these planets have been found at a distance of 650 to 18,000 light-years from Earth.
According to Associate Professor Ben Montet from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), senior author of the study: “There are a lot of things in astronomy that aren’t very tangible, but thanks to the famous Tatooine sunset scene in the first Star Wars film, everyone has an idea of what a surrounding planet looks like and what it would mean to be on a planet with two suns.”
The methodology used in the latest study published in Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Societyis known as ‘apside precession’, based on looking for a ‘wobble’ between stars orbiting and eclipsing each other.
The research involves monitoring “the exact timing of these eclipses” and the variations that occur in the eclipse schedules. This is how we can understand that “something else is going on in the system,” Thornton said.
To track the orbits, researchers used data from NASA’s Tessspace telescope, launched in 2018.
Previously, these circumbinary planets were identified only by their transits as they pass in front of a star and cast shadows on the star. But it also depends on the perfect alignment between the planet and its star. That’s why scientists struggle to identify potential planets.
“This new method could help us uncover a large population of hidden planets, especially those that don’t align perfectly from our line of sight. It could help reveal what the true population of planets is in our universe,” Thornton said.
Using this method, the team discovered 27 planets from 1,590 binary star systems, accounting for 2 percent of the binary star systems that these planets could potentially host.
These planets, yet to be named in future studies, could be as small as the mass of Neptune to 10x the mass of Jupiter.
Dr. Sara Webb, an astrophysicist at Swinburne University of Technology, hoped this technique would help researchers find more planets in the future.
Compared to other planets, circumbinary planets have very extreme environments. But a planet like Tatooine could exist in an environment that is neither too hot nor too cold.
