NASA satelliteJohannes Keplerhas discovered a planet like Luke Skywalker’s native in the movieStars Wars, Tatooine. Baptized as16-b, has the same characteristics as the film: cold temperature, gaseous atmosphere and desert climate. What’s moreit is circumbinary, that is, it revolves around two stars. NASA’s Kepler mission has detected the planet through what is known as “planetary transit,” an event in which a star dims as a planet passes in front of it.
According to experts, this body, which is located about 200 light years from Earth, demonstrates the diversity of planets that exists in the Milky Way. So far, “Kepler-16b is the first confirmed and unequivocal example of a circumbinary planet,” said Harvard-Smithsonian Center professor Josh Carter.
Kepler-16b has a radius corresponding to three-quarters that of Jupiter and weighs a third of its mass, so, according to scientists, it isvery similar to saturn. It takes 299 days to orbit its parent stars, which are 40 million miles away.
In this sense, the study, which has been published in the journalScience, notes thatthe two starsof the systemthey are smaller and cooler than the Sun. This situation is what makes Kepler-16b a planet with a cold surface temperature, around cold, with a surface temperature of around -73ºC to -100ºC.
