By Nadia Drake
Once confined to science fiction, a planet circling two stars has left the cinema and landed in reality: Scientists have spied a Saturn-sized world, called Kepler-16b, orbiting a binary star system.
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The sunset on Kepler-16b would look something like the iconic double sunset depicted in Star Wars, only better, says astrophysicist Laurance Doyle of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. “Nature is always more amazing,” says Doyle, coauthor of a Sept. 16 Science paper that describes Kepler-16b. “There, you’d get a different sunset every day!”
The two suns are different sizes, different colors, and always changing places. Every 41 days, these dancing stars complete a circle around one another, periodically eclipsing each other and reversing their position in the sky. The bigger star is orange and about 69 percent the mass of the sun, and the smaller star is quite red and only 20 percent the sun’s mass.