http://news.yahoo.com/planet-star-wars- ... -suns-181404397.htmlIt's a real-life Tatooine. A spectacle made popular by the "Star Wars" saga — a planet with two suns — has now been confirmed in space for the first time, astronomers revealed.
Scientists using NASA's Kepler space telescope captured details of a giant planet in orbit around the pair of binary stars that make up the Kepler-16 system, which is about 200 light-years away.
"This discovery is stunning," said study co-author Alan Boss at the Carnegie Institute in Washington. "Once again, what used to be science fiction has turned into reality."
When Tatooine was depicted on film, many scientists doubted that such planets could really exist. Now there's proof.
"It's possible that there's a real Tatooine out there," said John Knoll, visual effects supervisor at the special-effects firm Industrial Light and Magic, which was behind the "Star Wars" films. "Kepler 16b is unambiguous and dramatic proof that planets really do form around binaries."
The new discovery is expanding the bounds of what scientists, as well as filmakers, can conceive, he said.
"Again and again we see that the science is stranger and cooler than fiction," Knoll said during a NASA press conference today. "The very existence of these discoveries gives us cause to dream bigger, to question our assumptions."
)
