Scientists Find Evidence of a Real-Life Tatooine!
An artist's depiction of the binary brown-dwarf system
Post Author- Ellis Nolan
Probably the most recognizable landscape in the Star Wars universe is Tatooine, Luke Skywalker’s desolate home planet, where his fate finds him in the form of two crash-landing rebellion droids. Twin suns illuminate the desert wasteland, and in a recent discovery right out of George Lucas’s scripts, scientists believe they have found a planet similar to the one Skywalker begrudgingly calls home.
In a galaxy far, far away (around 120 light years from Earth, to be exact), researchers have found evidence of a planet orbiting two brown dwarfs, sometimes known as “failed stars.” This is because they lack the mass to fuse hydrogen, unlike stars like the Sun, but still emit light and heat from fusing deuterium, unlike gas giants such as Jupiter, in which no fusion is present.
Scientists recently noticed that the orbit of the two failed stars is changing, which would be unlikely to occur if their system was limited to the two objects. This led them to hypothesize that a third mass, a planet, must exist in the system. While it still hasn’t been directly observed, scientists already know of more than a dozen exoplanets that follow a multi-star orbit. They are quite rare, and more research is needed to confirm their existence, as well as whether it is inhabited by Banthas and Tusken Raiders.
Want to have your own piece of Tatooine? Check out our Krayt Dragon specimen here, a screen-used Star Wars Prop!
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