Thursday, September 15, 2011

Kepler Discovers Tatooine?


From the Boing Boing blog I see where the Kepler Space Telescope has discovered Tatooine! Yep, well almost. One planet orbiting two stars!!! Now there is something I bet you never thought you would read in print...well as news at least!

Studies of Kepler 16b continue to turn up strange and unusual items. Recent articles noted that 16b had very strange orbital dynamics which expressed itself as orbits of varying speeds. It was thought that the anomalies might be an unseen "ghost" planet. However the truth might be even weirder. The unseen companion may be a very dim star with 16b in orbit with it and the main star in the system. 16b of course would be no Tatooine. Even orbiting as close to the primary as it does, (orbiting as close to it's sun as Venus orbits our sun) because both stars are so dim that instead of being a hot desert world like Tatooine, it would instead be in permanent arctic like conditions. If 16b had a solid surface, temperatures there would be a bone chilling -100 degrees Fahrenheit.

4 comments:

JoshM said...

So it sounds like what they actually discovered is Hoth.

Beam Me Up said...

Is that the name of the planet he lived with his aunt and uncle on? I am terrible with names, so I just went with what the copy had in it. As I didn't really pay much attention to anything after Star Wars....well it sounded ok to me...

JoshM said...

Tatooine was the desert planet Luke came from in the first movie. Apparently it had two suns, which is what made it a desert. And what prompted the comparison with this newly discovered planet.

Hoth was the planet at the beginning of Empire Strikes Back. A kind of arctic wasteland -- which sounds a lot more like what this newly-discovered planet would actually be like.

Beam Me Up said...

oh ok... so Tatooine matches the references but not the reality, whereas Hoth matches the conditions but none of the references....
ooooooooooooooooooooook!