Rare planet resembling home of Luke Skywalker discovered
A team of international astronomers, including Australian researchers, has discovered a rare planet, just the second of its kind on record.
An international team of astronomers has discovered a rare new multi-planet system which closely resembles the home planet of Luke Skywalker, Tatooine.
BEBOP-1c is the second multi-planet circumbinary system to be discovered.
Planets in our Solar System revolve around one star, whereas BEBOP-1c revolves around two.
Researchers were quick to point out the planet looks like the Star Wars planet Tatooine, which is covered in harsh deserts and orbits fictional twin suns, Tattoo I and Tattoo II.
Named after the project which discovered it – Binaries Escorted By Orbiting Planets – the planet has a mass 65 times that of Earth and an orbital period of 215 days.
While researchers are aware of 12 circumbinary systems so far, BEBOP-1, also known as TOI-1338, is just the second to revolve around two stars.
Monash University School of Physics and Astronomy’s Dr Rosemary Mardling, co-author of the study led by researchers at University of Birmingham, said the discovery could help scientists learn how planets form.
“With an orbital period around 6.5 times that of the binary, BEBOP-1c is almost as close as it can be to the two stars – any closer and it would be kicked out of the system by the binary’s strong gravitational field,” she said.
A circumbinary planet in the same system named TOI-1338b was discovered using data from NASA’s TESS space telescope in 2020, but researchers were unable to determine its most fundamental parameter – its mass.
“With a period only twice that of BEBOP-1c, TOI-1338b is also perilously close to being thrown out of the nest,” Dr Mardling said.
The Tatooine-like planet was kept under watch via the Doppler method, also known as the wobble or the radial-velocity method, a technique dependent on measuring how fast stars move.
Researchers installed two telescopes in Chile’s Atacama Desert to try to measure the mass of TOI-1338b, but instead discovered BEBOP-1c.
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While they were unable to measure TOI-1338b’s mass, they succeeded with BEBOP-1c.
The telescopes tracking the planet’s journey around its two parent stars were shut down for six months during the Covid-19 pandemic, forcing researchers to wait until last year to observe the unrecorded section of its orbit.
Next, researchers will try to measure BEBOP-1c’s size.
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