I bet when George Lucas imagined Star Wars’ Tatooine with two suns, he didn’t realize it actually exists (or maybe he did?). For the benefit of non-Star Wars fans, Tatooine was a planet covered in harsh deserts, orbiting two suns, known as Tatoo I and Tatoo II. Anyways, the story was, NASA has spotted an alien planet that has three suns on its horizon. This intriguing alien planet, unromantically dubbed LTT 1445Ab, was picked by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) (which is basically, a space telescope of sort).
However, unlike the fictional planet from the galaxy far, far away, LTT 1445Ab only orbits around one of the three suns. Also technically, these suns are actually red dwarf stars since they are not as bright as the sun that we have over here. LTT 1445Ab was spotted in the middle of a triple-star system along with the said three ‘suns’ at 22.5 light years from Earth.
It is considered fairly near to Earth by galaxy standards, but still, don’t expect humans to drop by to check out this real life Tatooine anytime soon. At least not in our lifetime, or the lifetime of your children or your grandchildren’s. Lets focus on getting to the Red Planet first, shall we?
Anywho, although LTT 1445Ab has three stars at its horizon, only one of them will be more pronounced if you were be standing on the surface of LTT 1445Ab, cos’ two of them are actually quite far off and hence, the two other red dwarf stars will be tiny like “two red, ominous eyes in the sky” as co-author Jennifer Winters, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center of Astrophysics described it. Regardless, a planet with more than one sun is real. Now, I am beginning to wonder if some of the planets from Star Wars universe could be real too.
Source: Yahoo!
