New Saturn-Like Planet Has Two Suns, NASA Says
Like Star Wars's Tatooine, alien world would see double sunset.
(Related pictures: "The Worlds of Star Wars.")
(Related: "Darkest Planet Found: Coal-Black, It Reflects Almost No Light.")
Kepler data first allowed scientists to see that the stars are what's known as an eclipsing binary system—a pair of stars that orbit in such a way that they eclipse each other, causing them to dim, as seen from Earth.
Based on the eclipses, the team calculates that the binary stars are just 20 percent and 69 percent the mass of our sun.
Sometimes, however, the system's overall brightness dipped even when the stars were not eclipsing each other—hinting at the presence of a third body orbiting the binary pair.
"By timing the stellar eclipses, we could determine how much the third body was perturbing the
