Luke Skywalker’s childhood might have been slightly less harsh if he’d grown up on a more temperate Tatooine — like the ones identified in a new, Yale-led study.
According to the study’s authors, there are more climate-friendly planets in binary star systems — in other words, those with two suns — than previously known. And, they say, it may be a sign that, at least in some ways, the universe leans in the direction of orderly alignment rather than chaotic misalignment.
For the study, the researchers looked at planets in binary star systems — systems where individual planets orbit around a host star, with a second star, located nearby, that orbits the whole system. (The fictional desert planet Tatooine, from the “Star Wars” films, is in a binary star system.)
“We show, for the first time, that there is an unexpected pile-up of systems where everything is aligned,” said Malena Rice, an assistant professor of astronomy in the Yale Faculty of Arts and Sciences and lead author of the new study, which was published on February 22 in The Astronomical Journal. “The planets orbit precisely in the same direction that the first star rotates, and the second star orbits that system on the same plane as the planets.”
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