New Tatooine-like exoplanet discovered orbiting twin suns. Meet BEBOP-1c.

The confirmation of the second-ever known planetary system around twin stars comes from the finding of the new planet BEBOP-1c.

Astronomers pondered for many years whether planets with two stars, such as Tatooine, the fictitious home planet of Luke Skywalker, were merely the stuff of science fiction. Scientists have recently found a new system that resembles Tatooine and is home to several worlds.

Binary stars or two stars circling each other, are exceedingly common – almost half of the sun-like stars in the Milky Way galaxy are in binary systems. Astronomers have so far verified the discovery of 14 circumbinary planets, or planets that orbit both stars in a binary system simultaneously.

Circumbinary planets were previously assumed unlikely to exist because binary stars “stir up the planet-forming disks, creating a harsh environment for planets to form,” research lead author Matthew Standing, an astronomer at the Open University in England, told Space.com. When Kepler-16b was found in 2011 by the Kepler space telescope, everything changed. This finding demonstrated that the formation of these planets had to be conceivable.