Astronomers have captured a rare and cinematic sight: a distant planet orbiting not one, but two suns, much like the fictional world of Tatooine from Star Wars.
While scientists have discovered thousands of exoplanets beyond our solar system, directly imaging one is still uncommon.
Finding a planet that circles a pair of stars—and seeing it clearly—is even rarer.
What makes this new discovery truly remarkable is just how close the planet stays to its twin suns, closer than any other directly imaged planet in a binary star system.
The discovery was made by a team of astronomers at Northwestern University and published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
At the same time, a separate team of European astronomers from the University of Exeter independently reported the same planet, strengthening confidence in the finding.
Together, the studies offer a valuable new window into how planets form and move in complex systems with more than one star.
Only a small fraction of the roughly 6,000 known exoplanets orbit two stars. Even fewer have been directly imaged, meaning astronomers can actually see the planet and its stars rather than inferring its presence indirectly.
This system is especially exciting because scientists can track the motion of both the stars and the planet across the sky, allowing them to test theories of planet formation in ways that are not possible for most other systems.
The planet was not discovered with new observations but was hiding in plain sight within years-old data. When Northwestern astronomer Jason Wang was a Ph.D. student, he helped operate the Gemini Planet Imager, a powerful instrument designed to block out starlight and reveal faint planets nearby.
Over several years, the instrument observed more than 500 stars, but very few new planets were found.
Nearly a decade later, Wang asked graduate researcher Nathalie Jones to take another look at the data. As Jones carefully analyzed images taken between 2016 and 2019 and compared them with observations from the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, she noticed something unusual.
A faint object appeared to move through space in step with a star, rather than drifting independently like a distant background star.
By tracking its motion and analyzing its light, the team confirmed that the object was indeed a planet bound to the star system. To their surprise, it had been captured back in 2016 but overlooked in earlier searches. Around the same time, the European team independently reached the same conclusion after reexamining the data.
The newly confirmed planet is enormous, about six times the mass of Jupiter, and lies roughly 446 light-years from Earth. It formed around 13 million years ago, making it extremely young in cosmic terms. Because of its youth, it still glows with leftover heat from its formation, which makes it easier to image directly.
The two host stars orbit each other very tightly, completing a full revolution every 18 days. The planet, meanwhile, takes about 300 years to orbit both stars together. Although that sounds far away, it is still much closer to its suns than other directly imaged planets in similar systems—about six times closer than previous examples.
Astronomers are not yet sure how such a system forms, but they suspect the stars formed first, followed by the planet. With so few known examples, many questions remain unanswered.
The team plans to continue observing the system, tracking the movements of the planet and its stars over time.
The discovery also highlights the lasting value of archival data, showing that new worlds can still be found by looking again—with fresh eyes—at observations from the past.
Source: Northwestern University.
