![](http://uploads.neatorama.com/images/posts/426/59/59426/1364396793-0.jpg)
Luke Skywalker's planet Tattooine has two suns that rise and fall close together. When
Star Wars
first came out, it seemed ridiculous that a planet could revolve around
two stars at once, but as science fiction often goes, the real world
catches up later. French scientists have photographed a heavenly body
revolving around a binary star system. The possible planet is named
2MASS0103(AB)b, but is informally called Tattooine.
Philippe
Delorme of the Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, and
colleagues took the picture in November last year using a telescope in
Chile. Searches in the telescope's archives turned up data on the
object's position in 2002 (marked in the picture by a green arrow),
allowing them to trace its orbital motion around the binary stars.
Also
known as Tatooines, after a fictional world in Star Wars, planets that
orbit binary stars have only been found before through indirect methods.
The new object orbits at a distance of about 12.5 billion kilometres,
close enough to its stars to have been born from a disc of dust
surrounding them, like a planet. But it is 12 to 14 times the mass of
Jupiter, placing it near the dividing line between planets and failed
stars called brown dwarfs.
Whether this mass is a
planet or a star depends on how you define those things, as it appears
now to sit on the dividing line between a planet and a star. Read more
about Tattooine at
NewScientist.
No comments:
Post a Comment