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Summary NASA releases an image of a newly discovered planet in orbit around two stars.
When the day ends on planet Kepler-16b there is a double sunset, scientists reported in the journal Science.In a scene reminiscent of science fiction, researchers using observations from NASAs Kepler spacecraft have detected a distant planet orbiting two waltzing stars, the first time such a phenomenon has been confirmed.Binary stars -- two suns turning around each other -- have been seen before, and astronomers have suspected planets exist around them, but Keplers observations are the first to confirm it.Keplers mission is to scour our section of the Milky Way galaxy for Earth-like planets in the so-called habitable zone that is not too close and not too far away from the stars they orbit.The spacecraft does this by finding stars whose light periodically gets dimmer, which means there is an orbiting astronomical body -- a planet -- passing between the star and Keplers instruments.What made this find so eye-popping was that the stars were eclipsing each other as first one and then the other got in the way. And then a third eclipse indicated a planet was part of the system.If the notion of a planet with two suns seems familiar, it may be because it was displayed in the earliest Star Wars film on the fictional planet Tatooine, home of Luke Skywalker.Tatooine was a rocky, desert planet, but Kepler-16b is a cool gas giant, researchers said. Because both of its suns are smaller and cooler than our sun, Kepler-16b would be quite cold, with a surface temperature of around minus 100 to minus150 degrees F (minus 73 to minus 101 degrees Celsius), the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said in a statement.
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