Star Wars type of solar system discovered - New York News | NYC Breaking News

NASA says it has discovered two planets orbiting two suns, similar to Luke Skywalker's fictional home world of Tatooine in Star Wars.

It could help in the search for alien life.

The solar system is 4,900 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus.

Astronomers detected two planets in the Kepler-47 system, a pair of orbiting stars that eclipse each other every 7.5 days. Scientists say that one star is similar to the sun in size and the other is about one-third the size of the sun and less than 1 percent as bright.

The inner planet, Kepler-47b, orbits the pair of stars in less than 50 days. While it cannot be directly viewed, it is thought to be a sweltering world, where the destruction of methane in its super-heated atmosphere might lead to a thick haze that could blanket the planet.

The outer planet orbits its host pair every 303 days, placing it in the so-called "habitable zone," the region in a planetary system where liquid water might exist on the surface of a planet.  It is not believed to be hospitable for life.

William Borucki, Kepler mission principal investigator says, "In our search for habitable planets, we have found more opportunities for life to exist."

To search for transiting planets, the research team used data from the Kepler space telescope, which measures dips in the brightness of more than 150,000 stars.

"The presence of a full-fledged circumbinary planetary system orbiting Kepler-47 is an amazing discovery," said Greg Laughlin, professor of Astrophysics and Planetary Science at the University of California in Santa Cruz.

The scientists published their findings online Aug. 28 in the journal Science.

The discovery shows that planetary systems can survive even in the chaotic environment around binary stars.  Researchers now want to look for smaller alien planets around binary stars.