Science and Tech
Earth-sized ‘Tatooine’ planets could support life
Washington, April 13 (IANS): An Earth-sized exoplanet with two suns in its sky — like Luke Skywalker’s home planet Tatooine in “Star Wars” — could be habitable, says a study.
In the new study published in the journal Nature Communications, the scientists asked the question “if an Earth-size planet were orbiting two suns, could it support life?”
The findings suggest that it could, if located at the right distance from its two stars.
“This means that double-star systems of the type studied here are excellent candidates to host habitable planets, despite the large variations in the amount of starlight hypothetical planets in such a system would receive,” said Max Popp, research scholar at Princeton University in New Jersey, and the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany.