That image of Luke Skywalker staring out from his home planet of Tatooine in Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope is iconic. This is mostly because you see Luke staring up at two sunsets, which we all know can't happen in real life.
Or could it? Researchers Ben Bromley from the University of Utah and Scott Kenyon from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory have found that Earthlike, solid planets like Tatooine may exist and may even be common. Bromley and Kenyon have submitted their paper to Astrophysical Journal for review, although you can take a look at it over here now.
As you probably recall, in addition to being the home of Anakin and Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars franchise, Tatooine is a desert planet orbiting twins suns. It is a den of iniquity where podracing, gambling and slavery are widespread. Jabba the Hutt and his underlings basically run the planet as they carry out their organized crime operations.
Researchers previously discovered that uninhabitable gas-giant planets had binary stars like Tatooine's two suns. Conversely, rocky planets like Earth were thought to be unable to form around binary stars because their pull is so strong that the planetesimals that come together to form planets would be prone to collisions, not a smooth merge. However, Bromley and Kenyon used mathematical analysis and computer simulations to show that if planetesimals have oval-shaped orbits instead of circular ones, they can form around binary stars.
"We are saying you can set the stage to make these things," Bromley said in a statement. "It is just as easy to make an Earthlike planet around a binary star as it is around a single star like our sun. So we think that Tatooines may be common in the universe."
Though Brommley and Kenyon didn't actually identify planets with binary stars in the universe, this still blows my mind. Just think of what two sunsets would look like IRL. It would seem so unbelievable, like someone Photoshopped the sky, totally giving that double rainbow a run for its money.
Now I'm just dying to know if you can really go hang out at the Mos Eisley Cantina on some distant planet too.
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