GoKawiilThere's an iconic scene in the original Star Wars where Mark Hamill's Luke Skywalker watches a double sunset above Tatooine, the desert planet where he was raised. Planets with two suns are called circumbinary planets, and the fictional Tatooine is the most famous of these worlds.
Circumbinary planets also exist in reality, although they're rare. To date, scientists have confirmed the existence of only 18 circumbinary planets amid the roughly 6,000 planets that have been tallied outside of our solar system.
A new paper from a team of astronomers led by the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, reveals a method for finding the elusive two-sun planets. Using this process, the astronomers say they've already identified 27 potential circumbinary planet candidates.
"It's important to be clear that these are all candidates, not confirmed planets yet," Margo Thornton, a UNSW Sydney Ph.D. candidate who led the study, told CNET. "Follow-up observations will tell us for sure."
Eclipse watchers
Scientists have found most of the planets that we know about using the transit method. When a planet passes, or transits, between Earth and its star, we can see the shadow.
The dip in starlight from distant eclipses lets us track exoplanets -- planets outside our solar system -- light-years away from Earth.
But astronomers can only use the transit method to find planets that pass between Earth and their star. If the planet's orbit is outside our line of sight, we can't see it.
"Our method doesn't have that restriction," Thornton said. "It can find planets orbiting at all kinds of angles."
The method that the researchers used to find the new planets is called apsidal precession. While this method has been used with binary stars before, the team says this is the first time it's been employed in a wide-reaching search for new planets.
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