Star Wars Come True?

Tatooine-Like Planet Discovered | Fox News

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9/16/2011 1:41 PM

Star Wars Come True? Tatooine-Like Planet Discovered | Fox News

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AIR & SPACE - SCITECH

Star Wars Come True? Tatooine-Like Planet

Discovered
By Loren Grush
Published September 15, 2011 | FoxNews.com
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A planet orbiting a dual star system is just like the dusty 'Star Wars' home world of Luke Skywalker,
according to a research team from Carnegie Mellon. And while many planets have been suspected of
having two suns, this newfound planet is the first circumbinary" planet confirmed by astronomers.

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This is the first definitive case, Alan Boss, one of the researchers who made the discovery, told
FoxNews.com.

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People in the past have thought they saw instances like this. But there are other ways of explaining them.
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The team has determined that the planet has a similar mass and density to
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Mystery
while Tatooine was a desert planet, this planet is most likely quite chilly, with
temperatures about 100 degrees centigrade colder than on Earth. Thats about
as cold as it gets in Antarctica during the winter.

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But if it were possible to live on the planet, Boss says the sunsets and sunrises
would be spectacular.
It would change from day to day because the stars orbit around themselves
every 41 days, Boss told FoxNews.com. So every time you look at them,
theyre going to be in a different configuration in the sky. Sometimes they would
be close together, sometimes theyll be far apart. And when sunrises and
sunsets occur, sometimes theyll be quite widely spaced in time and sometimes
theyll go up and down almost simultaneously.
The planet's discovery was an unintentional consequence of the prime mission
of NASAs spacecraft Kepler. Launched in 2009, Keplers goal has been to
survey portions of the galaxy in search of Earth-sized planets orbiting stars like
the one in our solar system.

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The spacecraft examines over 150,000 thousand stars in the Milky Way, and
every once in a while, some of them turn out to be "eclipsing binaries" -- two
stars that orbit around a common center of mass. From Kepler's perspective,
such systems have two eclipses: a primary eclipse when the larger star is
partially blocked by the smaller one, and a secondary eclipse when the smaller
star is fully covered up by the larger one.

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Laurance Doyle, the lead author on the paper in Science, took a special
interest in the eclipsing binaries to see if any of them showed a dimming

9/16/2011 1:41 PM

Star Wars Come True? Tatooine-Like Planet Discovered | Fox News

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pattern indicating a planet revolving around them.

A young Luke Skywalker stares

out over the dusty planet
Tatooine in this film still from the
movie, "Star Wars."
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Laurance actually found the system where you can see the two stars eclipsing
each other, Boss told FoxNews.com. And in addition you can find a third
object which eclipses both of the stars periodically. First it dims one star, then it
dims the other star. So youre seeing four different types of dimming in the
system which is unprecedented. No ones ever seen that many types of
dimming in a single system from just three objects."

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Star Wars Come True?

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"It was just a serendipitous discovery.

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The team immediately recalled the famous desert planet from Star Wars. They
feel that this discovery is the closest proxy to date of any planet like Tatooine.

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Last year, there was a claimed discovery around a wide binary of a planet,
and those press releases and stories also invoked the memory of Tatooine,
Boss told FoxNews.com. But that was really inappropriate, because that was
a wide binary system. Whereas Tatooine was about a system like this one, a
close binary system where the two stars are right next to each other and the
planets orbit around both of them.

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The Carnegie Melon team's findings will be published in Science on Sept. 16.
They announced their discovery at a press conference at NASAs Ames
Research Center on Thursday, Sept. 15.
A representative from George Lucass visual effects company, Industrial Light and Magic, was in
attendance, providing images of Tatooine and invoking the memory of Star Wars from so long ago.

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Star Wars started back in '75 or so, so it took 35 years for reality to catch up with science fiction, Boss
told FoxNews.com. Its wonderful. I wish they could figure out a way to have warp drive too. Wouldnt we
all like to go faster than the speed of light? It takes a little bit longer to solve that one Im afraid.

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9/16/2011 1:41 PM