For decades, astronomers wondered if planets with twin Suns like Luke Skywalker’s fictional home world of Tatooine were only science fiction. Now, scientists have discovered a new Tatooine-like system that’s home to multiple worlds. Binary stars, or two stars orbiting each other, are very common – about half of the Sun-like stars in the Milky Way Galaxy are in binary systems. Up to now, astronomers had confirmed the detection of 14 circumbinary planets – ones that whirl around both stars of a binary system at once. “Circumbinary planets were originally thought not to exist, since the binary stars stir up the planet-forming discs, creating a harsh environment for planets to form,” study lead author Matthew Standing, an astrophysicist at the Open University, said. “This all changed with the discovery of Kepler-16 b in 2011 by the Kepler space telescope. This discovery showed that it must be possible for these planets to form.”
Until now, just one binary system was known to host multiple planets – Kepler-47, located about 5,000 light years away in the constellation of Cygnus, the Swan. This multi-planetary circumbinary system possesses a whopping three known worlds, Kepler-47 b, d and c. In the a study, astronomers investigated the binary system TOI-1338, located about 1,320 light years from Earth in the constellation of Pictor. In 2020, NASA’s exoplanet-hunting Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) discovered a circumbinary planet dubbed TOI- 1338 b orbiting TOI-1338’s pair of stars.
Using the European Southern Observatory and the Very Large Telescope, both located in the Atacama Desert in Chile, the scientists tried pinpointing the mass of TOI-1338 b. Despite their best efforts, they couldn’t achieve that. Instead they discovered a second planet. “With only 15 of these circumbinary planets known out of the over 5,200 total exoplanets discovered so far, it is exhilarating to be a part of this emerging branch of exoplanet science,” Standing said. “Our preliminary results show that circumbinary planets seem to exist as frequently as planets around single stars.”
The newfound world is called BEBOP-1c after the name of the project that collected the data, BEBOP, which stands for Binaries Escorted By Orbiting Planets.
