and the Planet that Orbits Them

It’s all over the news today—the Kepler Mission has found a planet called Kepler-16b that has two suns its sky. It is, in essence, orbiting two stars.  And, of course, the Star Wars comparisons to Tatooine are ricocheting around the blog-o-sphere and news media sites faster than you can say “Kessel Run.”

It’s completely appropriate to think back to that place in a galaxy far far away that has captivated so many fans of the Star Wars universe. I remember being completely awed by the view of the two suns setting in that alien sky, and yet it felt organic and real to me.  Maybe that’s a tribute to the artists at LucasFilm and the care they took to make it seem real.  But, as one of those artists—John Knoll, visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic—said about the story released today, “Working in film, we often are tasked with creating something never before seen. However, more often than not, scientific discoveries prove to be more spectacular than anything we dare imagine. There is no doubt these discoveries influence and inspire storytellers. Their very existence serves as cause to dream bigger and open our minds to new possibilities beyond what we think we ‘know.'”

That’s what’s so cool about today’s planetary discovery announcement.  It takes us to alien worlds that we now KNOW exist.  This exploration has moved from science fiction to science fact.  That world is there and those stars are there, and NASA-funded scientists and missions help us look at them. In fact, exoplanet discovery is a world-wide science industry. Earlier this week, scientists at the European Southern Observatory announced that they’d found more than 50 new exoplanets, using a specialized instrument attached to the La Silla Observatory in Chile. Among their finding are 16 super-Earths, worlds that are more massive than Earth but much less massive than the gas giant planets.  At least one of those planets exists on the edge of its system’s habitable zone, which is the distance from its star where an Earth-like planet could have liquid water on its surface.

Now, Kepler16-b isn’t the hot, desert world of Tatooine. It’s not a super-Earth. It’s actually about the size of Saturn, made of of half rock and half gas, and is cold. Really cold.  The stars it orbits are smaller than our Sun. One of them is only about 20 percent the size of our warm, yellow star. This means they’re dwarf stars. Kepler-16b takes 229 days to orbit its suns, and it is just far enough away that liquid water would not exist on its surface. So, there’s likely not life there.  (If you want more details on the discovery and the orbital information, check out the Kepler announcement here.)

But, let’s say there were intelligent life forms on that planet.  They would be different from us simply because the evolution of life on any planet is going to depend on the materials and elements available in that particular star-and-planet-system’s birth cloud. And, that raises a lot of very interesting conjectures about what life would evolve to be like on a planet with two suns, where the temps are low and the magnetic field environments would be different from ours.  Imagine two “solar wind” streams.  Imagine trying to tell time!  Early civilizations wouldn’t be able to use simple sundials.  What would they use?  How would they live?  What would they look like? And what would the weather be like on such a world?  These may be questions that science fiction writers can and will answer in stories about this place.  Perhaps they already have.   Time to go read some more SF and learn about the cosmos!