News | Earth-Sized 'Tatooine' Planets Could Be Habitable
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6811
With two suns in its sky, Luke Skywalker's home planet Tatooine in "Star Wars" looks like a parched, sandy desert world. In real life, thanks to observatories
such as NASA's Kepler space telescope, we know that two-star systems can indeed support planets, although planets discovered so far around double-star systems
are large and gaseous. Scientists wondered: If an Earth-size planet were orbiting two suns, could it support life?
It turns out, such a planet could be quite hospitable if located at the right distance from its two stars, and wouldn't necessarily even have deserts. In
a particular range of distances from two sun-like host stars, a planet covered in water would remain habitable and retain its water for a long time, according
to a new study in the journal Nature Communications.
"This means that double-star systems of the type studied here are excellent candidates to host habitable planets, despite the large variations in the amount of
starlight hypothetical planets in such a system would receive," said Max Popp, associate research scholar at Princeton University in New Jersey, and the Max
Planck Institute of Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany.
Popp and Siegfried Eggl, a Caltech postdoctoral scholar at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, created a model for a planet in the Kepler 35
system. In reality, the stellar pair Kepler 35A and B host a planet called Kepler 35b, a giant planet about eight times the size of Earth, with an orbit of 131.5
Earth days. For their study, researchers neglected the gravitational influence of this planet and added a hypothetical water-covered, Earth-size planet around
the Kepler 35 AB stars. They examined how this planet's climate would behave as it orbited the host stars with periods between 341 and 380 days.