Worlds with twin suns like Luke Skywalker's fictional home world Tatooine in "Star Wars" may be born far from the stellar heart of their alien solar systems, scientists say.
Although Earth may orbit around a single star, most sun-like stars are binaries - two stars orbiting each other as a pair. In fact, there are many three-star systems, even going up as high as seven-star systems.
Worlds that orbit around binary stars are known as circumbinary planets. The first real-life alien planet with two suns ever discovered by astronomers is Kepler-16b, a gas giant found orbiting the star Kepler-16 about 200 light-years from Earth...
Image caption and credit - An artist's illustration of Kepler-34b, an alien planet with two suns just like the fictional world of Tatooine in the "Star Wars" universe. Kepler-34b is a gas giant planet 4,900 light-years from Earth, and was discovered using NASA's Kepler space telescope.
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