First we get the Back to the Future sneakers and now Tatooine? It's a big week for sci-fi movie buffs, as NASA on Thursday revealed that its Kepler mission had uncovered evidence of a circumbinary planet, or a planet that orbits two stars.As Star Wars fans will know, and as PCMag analyst Tony Hoffman pointed out this week, the discovery is reminiscent of Tatooine, the planet on which Luke Skywalker grew up, which circled a double star, or two suns that appeared close together in the sky.
But before you pack up your things in hopes of living the life of a Jedi, NASA said the planet it has discovered is cold, gaseous, and not thought to contain life. It's about the size of Saturn and scientists think it's made up of half rock and half gas. Of the two stars, meanwhile, one is 69 percent the mass of our sun while the other is 20 percent.
But discovery of this system, dubbed Kepler-16, is significant because we've never before had actual proof of circumbinary planets. Read More
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