An Earth-sized exoplanet with two suns in its sky\u2014like Luke Skywalker\u2019s home planet Tatooine in \u201cStar Wars\u201d\u2014could be habitable, says a study.Thanks to observatories such as NASA\u2019s Kepler space telescope, we know that two-star systems can indeed support planets, but such planets discovered so far are large and gaseous.<\/p>\n
In the new study published in the journal Nature Communications, the scientists asked the question \u201cif an Earth-size planet were orbiting two suns, could it support life?\u201d<\/p>\n
The findings suggest that it could, if located at the right distance from its two stars.<\/p>\n
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, the study said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis 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,\u201d said Max Popp, research scholar at Princeton University in New Jersey, and the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany.<\/p>\n
The researchers created a model for a planet in the Kepler-35 system.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
For their study, researchers neglected the gravitational influence of this planet and added a hypothetical water-covered, Earth-size planet around the Kepler-35 A and B stars.<\/p>\n
They examined how this planet\u2019s climate would behave as it orbited the host stars with periods between 341 and 380 days.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur research is motivated by the fact that searching for potentially habitable planets requires a lot of effort, so it is good to know in advance where to look,\u201d said Siegfried Eggl, a California Institute of Technology (Caltech) postdoctoral scholar at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe show that it\u2019s worth targeting double-star systems,\u201d Eggl said.<\/p>\n
IANS<\/p>\n
Picture source: Alamy Image<\/p>\n
Picture used for illustrative purposes alone<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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