Astronomers Discover Tatooine-Like Planet With Two Suns
Just as Luke Skywalker watched two suns set from his sandy home planet Tatooine, a newly discovered planet called 2M1510 is circling its own twin stars some 120 light years away from our Solar System.
The trio is a rarity—and when all of its unusual traits are considered together, it is unique.
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Yahoo
05-05-2025
- Yahoo
What's up with Star Wars' bizarre 'mono-climate' planets?
Everywhere we look, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there are weird worlds that seemingly possess only one climate. How does that happen, though? How could these 'mono-climate' planets come to be? Here on Earth, we have numerous climates, from tropical rainforests and scorching deserts near the equator, to the icy wastelands of the north and south poles. These are spread about on four major land masses — the Americas, Afro-Eurasia, Antarctica, and Australia — that cover about 30 per cent of the planet's surface, with oceans making up the rest. Latitude and general weather patterns are the dominant factors that control exactly where these climates exist. In this image of Earth, snapped by the DSCOVER satellite's EPIC camera on July 15, 2020, we see snow and ice, mountains, plains, grasslands, forests, jungles, oceans, and deserts. (NASA) In the Star Wars galaxy, though, most (if not all) of the habitable planets and moons we've seen have only one climate that covers the entire world. Although the action often takes place on just a small portion of the surface, seen from orbit, even planets that are reasonably Earth-like still lack some basic features that should exist there, such as polar ice caps. So, how could worlds have developed like this, naturally? Tatooine is a desert world baked by twin stars — Tatoo I and Tatoo II. Like Mars, it likely had a much wetter environment in its past. The Dune Sea is evidence of it having a vast ocean, which probably dried up due to the system's binary stars heated up as they aged. Or, perhaps, like Jakku, with its immense impact scar, some cataclysmic event may have caused the planet to lose its water. In either case, there is likely not enough moisture on the planet for polar ice caps to form. Other desert worlds in Star Wars include Mandalore, Geonosis, Jedha, Pasaana, and Arvala-7. Dagobah, the planet where Jedi Master Yoda went into seclusion after the Clone Wars, and where he trained Luke Skywalker, is completely covered in swamps and bogs. This is very likely due to the thick layer of clouds that blankets the planet, similar to what we see on Venus (although not to the same extreme). The planet's persistent clouds would trap light and heat, producing a fairly uniform range of temperatures across the entire surface. 'Mud' planets, such as Mimban and Wobani, are probably quite similar, although they apparently lack the abundant biosphere of Dagobah. Kashyyyk, the homeworld of the Wookiees, is an entire planet covered by expansive rainforests and jungles, with numerous small tropical seas. The planet's lack of an axial tilt means it does not experience seasons. Also, the truly massive biosphere of this planet, with wroshyr trees growing up to 400 metres tall, may be what maintains relatively uniform temperatures from pole to pole. Other forest worlds we've seen include Tokodana, the planet that became Starkiller base, Dantooine, Sorgan, and Corvus. How these worlds maintain their uniform climate is not as clear. An ice planet like Hoth could develop fairly easily, simply by having an Earth-like world form farther out from its star. It's also possible that Hoth had simply gone through a climatic change, similar to the 'Snowball Earth' stage our planet may have gone through around 650 million years ago. It's thought that, at the time, the eruption of a supervolcano may have pumped enough dust or sunlight-reflecting sulfur compounds into the atmosphere to cool the climate. It is also possible that a surge in ocean life may have reduced the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, triggering a global cooling event. For the moons of Yavin IV and Endor, the infrared radiation (heat) given off by the gas giant planets they orbit can supply more than twice the energy the moons would receive from their system's parent star. This would be an abundant heat source, especially if the planet was reasonably close to its star (perhaps at the same relative distance that Mars is from our Sun). This added heat would help polar regions of the moons maintain a more temperate climate, as well. Once a lush world, Mustafar is a volcanic planet that was plunged into a gravitational 'tug-of-war' between two immense gas giants after it was knocked out of its original orbit. The intense gravity of these two massive worlds would squeeze and squish Mustafar's core, ramping up the heat inside the planet until it caused volcanoes to erupt across its surface. This same kind of 'tidal squeezing' is evident in our own solar system, with Jupiter's closest Galilean moon, Io, being one of the most volcanically active objects in the system. The sunlit hemisphere of Io is shown here, marked by numerous volcanoes 'powered' by the tidal squeezing of the moon by massive Jupiter, as well as Europa and Ganymede. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Thomas Thomopoulos) Moons like Jupiter's Europa and Saturn's Enceladus likely have oceans of liquid water, even at their far distance from the Sun, due to the added internal heat from this same kind of tidal action. Kamino and Mon Cala are two examples of 'ocean worlds' in the Star Wars galaxy. Both of these planets likely have no dry land at all. From the exoplanets astronomers have discovered in our own galaxy, these two could fall into the "super-Earth" category. With heavier gravity than we experience here, this kind of planet holds on to more atmosphere, and would tend to develop deeper oceans. It's also possible that they simply developed in planetary systems that had more available water, or were under heavier bombardment by comets early on. As for the climate of these worlds, the global ocean of such a planet would absorb a large amount of incoming solar radiation, and would be slower to give this heat up. With internal ocean currents and likely frequent hurricane-class storms delivering that heat from the equator to the poles, these planets could also maintain fairly uniform global temperatures. Ahch-to, where Jedi Master Luke Skywalker lived during his self-imposed exile, is another example, although this planet had numerous rocky islands. Scarif, which housed the Empire's data vaults, is another example, although its oceans appeared to be shallow, and Crait is likely another, although its oceans have long dried up, leaving behind a planet-wide crust of salt. This may look like a planet in a galaxy far, far away, but it is actually an artist's representation of TOI 700d, an Earth-sized exoplanet found by NASA's TESS telescope in 2020. (NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center) There are a few bodies in our own solar system that, if they were closer to the Sun, would be water-worlds. Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, Enceladus and Titan, and even the 'asteroid' Ceres, would qualify. As we see above, there are many mono-climate worlds in the Star Wars galaxy that could exist simply by natural means. However, several defy explanation if you only look at what could have developed without intervention. Alderaan, Naboo, and Lothal appear to be some of the most 'temperate' planets in the Star Wars galaxy. Each has (or had) its own dominant terrain, though — Alderaan: mountains, Naboo: hills and lakes, and Lothal: grasslands. Planets like these would need help to maintain one global climate, though. Given the technological level of the galaxy, with antigravity, interstellar travel, synthetic intelligence, and so on, it is very likely that the Republic developed the means to terraform (Coruscant-form?) planets. Any world that was suitable, but for some reason did not develop a habitable climate on its own, would then have its climate deliberately adjusted to meet the needs of a new colony. Artificial weather modification could redistribute heat and moisture across a planet's surface, making as much of it habitable as possible. This could easily include the melting of a planet's polar ice caps, to transport that water to more temperate zones, thus smoothing out any variation of climates that would have occurred without that intervention. Finally, planets like Coruscant and Hosnian Prime are best described as 'urban planets', or ecumenopoli, due to the fact that nearly every square centimetre of their surfaces is covered in city sprawl. On Coruscant, the urban environment is so extreme that, to see any of its original surface, residents and tourists need to visit Monument Plaza, on the planet's 5,216th level. There, they can see the summit of Umate, Coruscant's tallest mountain, poking up above the new artificial surface. If Umate was the same height as Mount Everest on Earth, that level would be at over 8,000 metres above Coruscant's original sea level, making the air so thin that you couldn't breathe for long without collapsing. That implies that Coruscant is completely climate-controlled, with all weather suppressed or altered through technology. Also, with its biosphere reduced to nothing and a population numbering in the trillions, the planet would even need atmospheric processors running constantly to add and refresh the oxygen content of the air. In reality, many planets in our galaxy (and even other galaxies) will probably have a variety of climates, like Earth. However, given the variety we have discovered so far, who knows what we will end up finding in the future! In the meantime, we can continue to enjoy the multitude of bizarre worlds shown to us in the Star Wars universe. May the Fourth be with you! Click here to view the video
Yahoo
04-05-2025
- Yahoo
What would it be like living on Tatooine from 'Star Wars'? This exoplanet orbiting twin suns could tell us
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A Tatooine-like world with a key difference from the desert planet in "Star Wars" has been serendipitously discovered orbiting not two stars, but a pair of brown dwarfs. What's more, this wacky planet doesn't orbit around the brown dwarfs' equator, but instead up and down over their poles. In the "Star Wars" universe, Luke Skywalker famously came from the planet of Tatooine, which had two suns and double sunsets. Tatooine is in a circumbinary orbit, which means that it doesn't orbit one star, but instead orbits both stars of a binary system. Binary systems are common in our Milky Way galaxy — about two-thirds of all stars (and brown dwarfs) are found in binary systems. Yet given the near ubiquity of these stellar pairs, very few planets have been discovered on circumbinary orbits — just 16 up until now. Those 16 all orbit around the equatorial plane of their double star system — such orbits are said to be 'co-planar'. This is just one of the reasons that this new Tatooine-like planet, which is 118 light years away and called 2M1510(AB)b, is rather unique. Another reason is that it orbits two brown dwarfs (which also happen to eclipse each other from our point of view, and are only the second pair of eclipsing brown dwarfs to have been found). Brown dwarfs are sometimes referred to as 'failed stars' — they are objects that form like a star by collapsing directly out of a molecular gas cloud, but which are not massive enough to generate the temperatures and pressures required at their core for hydrogen-based fusion reactions. The concept of planets on polar orbits isn't entirely surprising. Previous studies have discovered planets on polar orbits around single stars, while the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile has observed dusty protoplanetary disks tilted around young binary stars. However, 2M1510(AB)b is the first bonafide planet to be found on a circumbinary polar orbit. "Our expectation is that the planet would have formed in an inclined disc, such as those observed by ALMA," said Amaury Triaud, a professor of astronomy at the University of Birmingham, UK, in an interview with Triaud was part of the research team that discovered this planet. There are, however, some caveats. One is the planet's distance from the brown dwarfs, which at this current time is unknown. If it is too far away, then the disk from which it formed would have been harder to tilt. In this case, alternative ideas would have to be considered, such as an interaction with a passing star. We don't know the orbital period of 2M1510(AB)b, nor its diameter and mass, because this planet wasn't discovered in a conventional way. Triaud is part of a team led by Thomas Baycroft, who is a PhD student at Birmingham. They were targeting the brown dwarfs with the Very Large Telescope in Chile, with the aim of constraining the two brown dwarf's orbital parameters around each other. But they began to notice the very subtle effect of the brown dwarfs being tugged this way and that by an unseen body. Putting their data into various models, they found that the best explanation is that of a large planet, between 10 and 100 times the mass of Earth, on a polar orbit aligned 90 degrees to the equatorial plane of the brown dwarfs. Intriguingly, a circumbinary polar orbit is more stable than a co-planar orbit, says Triaud. This is not necessarily the case for planets on polar orbits around single stars. "We still do not fully understand why certain planets orbiting single stars are on polar orbits, and since what we've found is the first polar circumbinary geometry, we also do not know much about it," he said. "For single stars, the planetary orbit could have misaligned, or the stellar rotation axis could have moved. A final scenario, which I am very skeptical about, is that polar planets orbiting single stars were once circumbinary planets themselves, with the two stars coalescing." Audiences have been wowed over the years by Tatooine's double sunset in Star Wars, and planets in circumbinary orbits do have different diurnal and seasonal patterns compared to Earth. On a circumbinary planet, the length of day would depend upon how far apart the stars are in the sky at any one time. At their widest angular separation, the days would last longer than when the stars are close together in the sky. Also think about their orbits. The two stars are orbiting the center of mass between them, and a circumbinary planet orbits both stars as they move about this center of mass. As the planet orbits around them, it will at different times find itself closer to one star than the other, and at other times be equidistant to both stars. This dance of stars and planet would undoubtedly have an effect on the planet's climate. "A circumbinary planet experiences a sort of seasonal modulation, on roughly the timescale of the binary orbit, or half of it," said Triaud. There's lots of potential permutations here. If both stars are of similar mass, then the planet will experience winter when it is closer to just one of them, and summer when they are equidistant. If they have different masses, say a sun-like star and a cool, feeble red dwarf, then the warmer seasons would occur when a circumbinary planet is closer to the more massive star. It's even plausible that a planet could dip in and out of the habitable zone — it would be inside the habitable zone when it's closer to the more massive star, and out when it is nearer the smaller, cooler star. But how would a circumbinary planet on a polar orbit fare? "A polar planet would also feel a little like this since the stars constantly move and change distance relative to the planet, but the effect would be reduced compared to a co-planar situation," said Triaud. RELATED STORIES: — New Tatooine-like exoplanet discovered orbiting twin suns. Meet BEBOP-1c. — How common are Tatooine worlds? — Astronomers discover doomed planet shedding a Mount Everest's worth of material every orbit, leaving behind a comet-like tail The 2M1510 system also has a third brown dwarf farther out that the planet does not orbit. It is unlikely that there would be life on 2M1510(AB)b — brown dwarfs are far too cool to keep a planet warm enough for liquid water. Luke Skywalker's homeworld of Tatooine is a dry desert world, with very subtle seasons. During the double sunset, we see two sun-like stars close together. Perhaps they are on a tight orbit around one another, meaning their distance from the planet stays fairly similar. Luke found life on Tatooine to be boring, but he should be glad, because as we have seen, binary stars have the potential to play all kinds of havoc on their orbiting circumbinary planets. The discovery of this first-ever circumbinary polar planet was published on April 16 in Science Advances.
Yahoo
04-05-2025
- Yahoo
What's up with Star Wars' bizarre 'mono-climate' planets?
Everywhere we look, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there are weird worlds that seemingly possess only one climate. How does that happen, though? How could these 'mono-climate' planets come to be? Here on Earth, we have numerous climates, from tropical rainforests and scorching deserts near the equator, to the icy wastelands of the north and south poles. These are spread about on four major land masses — the Americas, Afro-Eurasia, Antarctica, and Australia — that cover about 30 per cent of the planet's surface, with oceans making up the rest. Latitude and general weather patterns are the dominant factors that control exactly where these climates exist. In this image of Earth, snapped by the DSCOVER satellite's EPIC camera on July 15, 2020, we see snow and ice, mountains, plains, grasslands, forests, jungles, oceans, and deserts. (NASA) In the Star Wars galaxy, though, most (if not all) of the habitable planets and moons we've seen have only one climate that covers the entire world. Although the action often takes place on just a small portion of the surface, seen from orbit, even planets that are reasonably Earth-like still lack some basic features that should exist there, such as polar ice caps. So, how could worlds have developed like this, naturally? Tatooine is a desert world baked by twin stars — Tatoo I and Tatoo II. Like Mars, it likely had a much wetter environment in its past. The Dune Sea is evidence of it having a vast ocean, which probably dried up due to the system's binary stars heated up as they aged. Or, perhaps, like Jakku, with its immense impact scar, some cataclysmic event may have caused the planet to lose its water. In either case, there is likely not enough moisture on the planet for polar ice caps to form. The outer rim planet of Tatooine has two suns, podracing, and dangerous spaceports full of scum and villainy. If there's a bright center of the universe, this is the planet that it's farthest from. — Star Wars (@starwars) July 9, 2019 Other desert worlds in Star Wars include Mandalore, Geonosis, Jedha, Pasaana, and Arvala-7. Dagobah, the planet where Jedi Master Yoda went into seclusion after the Clone Wars, and where he trained Luke Skywalker, is completely covered in swamps and bogs. This is very likely due to the thick layer of clouds that blankets the planet, similar to what we see on Venus (although not to the same extreme). The planet's persistent clouds would trap light and heat, producing a fairly uniform range of temperatures across the entire surface. 'Mud' planets, such as Mimban and Wobani, are probably quite similar, although they apparently lack the abundant biosphere of Dagobah. Kashyyyk, the homeworld of the Wookiees, is an entire planet covered by expansive rainforests and jungles, with numerous small tropical seas. The planet's lack of an axial tilt means it does not experience seasons. Also, the truly massive biosphere of this planet, with wroshyr trees growing up to 400 metres tall, may be what maintains relatively uniform temperatures from pole to pole. Revenge of the Sith concept art for Kashyyyk... before the attack on the Wookiees. 😉 — Star Wars (@starwars) January 23, 2018 Other forest worlds we've seen include Tokodana, the planet that became Starkiller base, Dantooine, Sorgan, and Corvus. How these worlds maintain their uniform climate is not as clear. An ice planet like Hoth could develop fairly easily, simply by having an Earth-like world form farther out from its star. It's also possible that Hoth had simply gone through a climatic change, similar to the 'Snowball Earth' stage our planet may have gone through around 650 million years ago. #McQuarrieMonday - Imperial Star Destroyers over Hoth. — Star Wars (@starwars) April 21, 2015 It's thought that, at the time, the eruption of a supervolcano may have pumped enough dust or sunlight-reflecting sulfur compounds into the atmosphere to cool the climate. It is also possible that a surge in ocean life may have reduced the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, triggering a global cooling event. For the moons of Yavin IV and Endor, the infrared radiation (heat) given off by the gas giant planets they orbit can supply more than twice the energy the moons would receive from their system's parent star. #SpotlightOfTheWeek - Yavin 4: location of the first Rebel more at: — Star Wars (@starwars) January 18, 2015 This would be an abundant heat source, especially if the planet was reasonably close to its star (perhaps at the same relative distance that Mars is from our Sun). This added heat would help polar regions of the moons maintain a more temperate climate, as well. Once a lush world, Mustafar is a volcanic planet that was plunged into a gravitational 'tug-of-war' between two immense gas giants after it was knocked out of its original orbit. The intense gravity of these two massive worlds would squeeze and squish Mustafar's core, ramping up the heat inside the planet until it caused volcanoes to erupt across its surface. This same kind of 'tidal squeezing' is evident in our own solar system, with Jupiter's closest Galilean moon, Io, being one of the most volcanically active objects in the system. The sunlit hemisphere of Io is shown here, marked by numerous volcanoes 'powered' by the tidal squeezing of the moon by massive Jupiter, as well as Europa and Ganymede. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Thomas Thomopoulos) Moons like Jupiter's Europa and Saturn's Enceladus likely have oceans of liquid water, even at their far distance from the Sun, due to the added internal heat from this same kind of tidal action. Kamino and Mon Cala are two examples of 'ocean worlds' in the Star Wars galaxy. Both of these planets likely have no dry land at all. From the exoplanets astronomers have discovered in our own galaxy, these two could fall into the "super-Earth" category. With heavier gravity than we experience here, this kind of planet holds on to more atmosphere, and would tend to develop deeper oceans. It's also possible that they simply developed in planetary systems that had more available water, or were under heavier bombardment by comets early on. As for the climate of these worlds, the global ocean of such a planet would absorb a large amount of incoming solar radiation, and would be slower to give this heat up. With internal ocean currents and likely frequent hurricane-class storms delivering that heat from the equator to the poles, these planets could also maintain fairly uniform global temperatures. Ahch-to, where Jedi Master Luke Skywalker lived during his self-imposed exile, is another example, although this planet had numerous rocky islands. Scarif, which housed the Empire's data vaults, is another example, although its oceans appeared to be shallow, and Crait is likely another, although its oceans have long dried up, leaving behind a planet-wide crust of salt. This may look like a planet in a galaxy far, far away, but it is actually an artist's representation of TOI 700d, an Earth-sized exoplanet found by NASA's TESS telescope in 2020. (NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center) There are a few bodies in our own solar system that, if they were closer to the Sun, would be water-worlds. Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, Enceladus and Titan, and even the 'asteroid' Ceres, would qualify. As we see above, there are many mono-climate worlds in the Star Wars galaxy that could exist simply by natural means. However, several defy explanation if you only look at what could have developed without intervention. Alderaan, Naboo, and Lothal appear to be some of the most 'temperate' planets in the Star Wars galaxy. Each has (or had) its own dominant terrain, though — Alderaan: mountains, Naboo: hills and lakes, and Lothal: grasslands. Filled with beautiful, idyllic lakes and bustling cities, Naboo was a peaceful planet thrust into the galactic spotlight a decade before the Clone Wars. #TravelTuesday — Star Wars (@starwars) April 23, 2019 Planets like these would need help to maintain one global climate, though. Given the technological level of the galaxy, with antigravity, interstellar travel, synthetic intelligence, and so on, it is very likely that the Republic developed the means to terraform (Coruscant-form?) planets. Any world that was suitable, but for some reason did not develop a habitable climate on its own, would then have its climate deliberately adjusted to meet the needs of a new colony. Artificial weather modification could redistribute heat and moisture across a planet's surface, making as much of it habitable as possible. This could easily include the melting of a planet's polar ice caps, to transport that water to more temperate zones, thus smoothing out any variation of climates that would have occurred without that intervention. Finally, planets like Coruscant and Hosnian Prime are best described as 'urban planets', or ecumenopoli, due to the fact that nearly every square centimetre of their surfaces is covered in city sprawl. #SpotlightOfTheWeek - Over centuries of civilization, Coruscant has been covered with cityscapes & urban sprawl. — Star Wars (@starwars) June 1, 2014 On Coruscant, the urban environment is so extreme that, to see any of its original surface, residents and tourists need to visit Monument Plaza, on the planet's 5,216th level. There, they can see the summit of Umate, Coruscant's tallest mountain, poking up above the new artificial surface. If Umate was the same height as Mount Everest on Earth, that level would be at over 8,000 metres above Coruscant's original sea level, making the air so thin that you couldn't breathe for long without collapsing. That implies that Coruscant is completely climate-controlled, with all weather suppressed or altered through technology. Also, with its biosphere reduced to nothing and a population numbering in the trillions, the planet would even need atmospheric processors running constantly to add and refresh the oxygen content of the air. In reality, many planets in our galaxy (and even other galaxies) will probably have a variety of climates, like Earth. However, given the variety we have discovered so far, who knows what we will end up finding in the future! In the meantime, we can continue to enjoy the multitude of bizarre worlds shown to us in the Star Wars universe. May the Fourth be with you! Click here to view the video
