A Tatooine-Like Planet Is Revealing How Worlds Form Around Two Suns
A planet orbiting two suns has been imaged — a rare achievement made even more striking by how closely the world hugs its stellar pair. The newly confirmed exoplanet circles its twin stars at a tighter distance than any other directly imaged planet in a binary system, offering an unusually clear view of how planets behave in complex gravitational environments.
Reported in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the discovery allows astronomers to track the motion of both the planet and its host stars at the same time — a rare test of how planetary systems form in binary star environments. The setup recalls the fictional world of Tatooine from Star Wars, but this newly imaged planet offers a real-world opportunity to study how planets behave around two stars.
“Of the 6,000 exoplanets that we know of, only a very small fraction of them orbit binaries,” said Jason Wang, a senior author of the study, in a press release. “Of those, we only have a direct image of a handful of them, meaning we can have an image of the binary and the planet itself. Imaging both the planet and the binary is interesting because it’s the only type of planetary system where we can trace both the orbit of the binary star and the planet in the sky at the same time. We’re excited to keep watching it in the future as they move, so we can see how the three bodies move across the sky.”
A Young Exoplanet in a Binary Star System
The planet is remarkably young. It formed roughly 13 million years ago. The system lies about 446 light-years from Earth — not in our immediate stellar neighborhood, but close enough to feel like the astronomical equivalent of the next town over.
“That sounds like a long time ago, but it’s 50 million years after dinosaurs went extinct,” Wang said. “That’s relatively young in universe speak, so it still retains some of the heat from when it formed.”
The two host stars circle one another rapidly, completing an orbit every 18 Earth days. The planet, by contrast, follows a much slower path, taking about 300 years to loop around both suns — slightly longer than Pluto takes to orbit our own.
Despite that leisurely pace, the planet sits closer to its stars than any other directly imaged planet known to orbit a binary system.
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Revealing a Hidden Planet
The planet didn’t turn up during a new observing campaign. Instead, it emerged from a reanalysis of archival images taken by the Gemini Planet Imager, which is designed to block starlight and reveal faint planetary companions.
As the instrument was being upgraded, researchers revisited data collected between 2016 and 2019 and compared it with observations from another major observatory. One faint object stood out because it moved in step with its host stars rather than drifting independently across the background.
“Stars don’t stand still in a galaxy, they move around,” Wang said. “We look for objects and then revisit them later to see if they have moved elsewhere. If a planet is bound to a star, then it will move with the star. Sometimes, when we revisit a ‘planet,’ we find it’s not moving with its star. Then, we know it was just a photobombing star passing through. If they are both moving together, then that’s a sign that it’s an orbiting planet.”
What Comes Next for Binary Star Worlds
The system offers a rare chance to study a planet orbiting unusually close to a pair of stars — a configuration that challenges current ideas about how such worlds form. With only a small number of comparable systems known, its origins remain uncertain.
Researchers plan to keep monitoring the system to track how the planet and both stars move over time. Those measurements could help clarify how planets settle into stable orbits around binary stars — and whether similar systems are hiding in existing telescope data.
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