With two suns in its sky, Luke Skywalker's home planet Tatooine in "Star Wars" looks like a parched, sandy desert world. In real life, thanks to observatories such as NASA's Kepler space telescope, we know that two-star systems can indeed support planets, although planets discovered so far around double-star systems are large and gaseous. Scientists wondered: If an Earth-size planet were orbiting two suns, could it support life?
It turns out, such a planet could be quite hospitable if located at the right distance from its two stars, and wouldn't necessarily even have deserts. In a particular range of distances from two sun-like host stars, a planet covered in water would remain habitable and retain its water for a long time, according to an April 6, 2017 study in the journal Nature Communications.
This illustration shows a hypothetical planet covered in water around the binary star system of Kepler-35A and B. In reality, the stellar pair Kepler-35A and B host a planet called Kepler-35b, a giant planet about eight times the size of Earth, with an orbit of 131.5 Earth days. For their study, researchers neglected the gravitational influence of this planet and added a hypothetical water-covered, Earth-size planet around the Kepler-35 A and B stars. They examined how this planet’s climate would behave as it orbited the host stars with periods between 341 and 380 days.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA: Illustration of an Earth-Sized 'Tatooine' Planet
Notably absent from any releases about space is any news of improvements in the ability to achieve or surpass the speed of light. Barring that accomplishment, travel over interstellar distances takes so long it can only be a one-way trip and with a self-sustaining ecosystem in the ship.
Approaching light speed results in the time dilation effect which creates all manner of twisted complications so it seems we're still living with a dream much as we do with nuclear fusion that it will work someday but it doesn't work now.
Should they find it's possible to exceed light speed, that will have to mean there's something about the physics of it they don't currently understand and perhaps that will obviate the time dilation problem ... or exacerbate it. FTL spaceflight may mean the ship travels much faster but the consequent effect is still subjective time on the ship will not match objective time on Earth where it will seem to pass more slowly.
There's a tremendous research taking place to find more places in the Universe we may want to go and that's cool since it gives an extra incentive to get there. However, we still don't have a way to realistically traverse the distance so maybe images of this nature will spark some young brainiacs to build that FTL drive.
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