With the recent announcement that the world’s superpowers are about to make Star Wars a reality by looking to space as the next battlefield, it’s only fitting that right around the same time, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has announced the discovery of a real life Tatooine, or at least a planet that resembles its fictional counterpart from Star Wars.
A Timely Discovery
The exoplanet known as Kepler-453b is what is known as a circumbinary planet. A circumbinary planet is a planet that orbits two stars, and Kepler-453b is the tenth such planet discovered so far. It is a timely discovery not only because it was discovered at around the same time that news broke out of the world’s superpowers looking to make Star Wars a reality by waging war in space, but also because the real life Tatooine was discovered by chance in a classic case of being in the right place at the right time.
The astronomers who made the discovery said that the real life Tatooine’s transits are only visible 9 percent of the time because the tilt of the planet’s orbit changes so quickly. They explained that they were lucky that they were able to detect the planet, because transits are usually not visible from Earth.
San Francisco State University’s Stephen Kane, a member of the team that discovered Kepler-453b, said that if they had been looking at the area that the alien world was discovered in any earlier or any later, they would most likely have missed it and would have assumed that there was no planet in that area. He explained that this meant there could be many more real life Tatooine planets out there that they had just missed because they weren’t looking at it within the right time frame. If the scientists on the Kepler team had missed the detection of Kepler-453b this time around, the next chance they would have gotten to discover the alien world would be in the year 2066.
A Real Life Tatooine in the Habitable Zone
Kane also said that the planet was discovered to be within the habitable zone of its stars, which makes this discovery even more important. This finding is significant because alien worlds within the habitable zone of their parent stars are potential places where life could thrive. The “habitable zone” is the area around a star (or in this case, the stars) that possesses the right conditions from which life could potentially spring forth.
If this planet is much older than Earth, that could mean that this alien world is just as full of life as our own home planet is. However, the scientists who discovered it measured the planet to be about 6.2 times bigger than Earth, or about 60 percent bigger than Neptune, which means that it could actually be a gas giant instead of a rocky planet. If that ends up being the case, it is unlikely that this particular real life Tatooine would be inhabited by extraterrestrial life.
The discovery is explained in full detail in an article published in the Astrophysical Journal, and is to be announced in Honolulu at the International Astronomical Union meeting by San Diego State University’s Professor William Welsh.
When Science Fiction Becomes Reality
This is but the latest in several announcements that have sci-fi aficionados everywhere excited at the notion of science fiction becoming a reality. With the death of the universe looming over our heads, and the potential for war to break out in space, the discovery of a real life Tatooine is welcome news for those who have dreamed of the day when Star Wars becomes a reality.
