Tuesday, May 17, 2005

Planets with Two Suns Likely Common

In the Star Wars saga, the Skywalker clan has its roots on the Tatooine - a desert-covered planet revolving around two suns. A theoretical investigation has explored the likelihood for worlds like this to exist."

And it looks like the nearest Tatooine may be closer than a galaxy far, far away.


That's because more than half of the stars in our galaxy have a stellar companion.

...

The research group also ran simulations that mimicked Alpha Centauri - the nearest binary system to Earth, where the closest the two stars come is about 11 AU. The secondary star apparently acts like Jupiter does in our solar system - limiting how far out planets can form. The results showed several terrestrial planets were possible around either of the stars.

Do you know what that means? Tatooine might only be 4 light years away!

Click the Alpha Centauri link. Cool.

1 comment:

Al said...

I went over to look at that and ended up reading an article about Space Tourism. I blogged about it at BPoMN.