Friday, September 16, 2011

NASA Kepler: Planet orbits 2 Suns

This image provided by NASA shows an artist's depiction showing a discovery by NASA's Kepler mission of a world where two suns set over the horizon instead of just one.

The planet, called Kepler-16b, is the most "Tatooine-like" planet yet found in our galaxy and is depicted here with its two stars.

Tatooine is the name of Luke Skywalker's home world in the science fiction movie Star Wars.

In this case, the planet it not thought to be habitable.

It is a cold world, with a gaseous surface, but like Tatooine, it circles two stars. The largest of the two stars, a K dwarf, is about 69 percent the mass of our sun, and the smallest, a red dwarf, is about 20 percent the sun's mass.

(AP photo/NASA)

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