Discovery of Kepler-16 b

Kepler-16b is a planet found by NASA's Kepler space telescope that orbits two stars instead of one, making it the first confirmed circumbinary planet. The two stars, a small orange dwarf and a much smaller red dwarf, orbit each other, and the planet circles both every 229 days. It was detected because the telescope saw the planet pass in front of both stars, along with changes in the timing of the stars' eclipses. Kepler-16b is a cold gas giant about the size of Saturn, so unlikely to harbour life, but the sky from a moon would show two suns. Journalists nicknamed it Tatooine, after the fictional planet in Star Wars.

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