Planet Orbiting Two Stars Discovered

An international team discovered a planet which orbits two stars, like the fictional planet Tatooine featured in the sci-fi film series Star Wars. They made the finding through NASA’s Kepler spacecraft. The planet, called Kepler-16b, is about 200 light years from Earth and is believed to be a frozen world of rock and gas, about the size of Saturn.

It orbits two stars that are also circling each other, one about two-thirds the size of our sun, the other about a fifth the size of our sun. The two stars orbit each other every 41 days at a distance of about 21 million miles. The planet completes a circular orbit around both stars every 229 days at a distance of 65 million miles, according to the findings published in the Science journal.