Twin stars

If the aesthetics of every sunset eclipses its science,is a double sunset doubly beautiful then? We dont know,since the only pair of eyes we see one through is of Star Wars pedigree. Nevertheless,we would like to believe it is so. But the scene in which Luke Skywalker watches the double sunset of his home planet Tatooines twin suns is,above all,melancholic. Because,dried up,desertified Tatooines misery is compounded by the harshness of two suns. Now,what art re-imagines from half-formed,half-understood scientific fantasy,possibility or theory is often more spectacular when established as fact.

Planetary systems involving twin stars arent newcomers to astronomy. But on September 16,NASA published a report in the journal Science about the first unambiguous detection of a circumbinary planet8230; 200 light-years from Earth. No Luke Skywalker lives there; nor is the Saturn-like Kepler-16b anything more than a cold and rocky gas giant,just beyond the habitable zone of the planetary system. NASAs Kepler mission has now established the existence of a circumbinary planet beyond any doubt,using its twin capabilities of observing both stellar eclipses and planetary transits,thereby measuring the sizes of both the stars and the planet. Smaller than our Sun,the two stars are only 69 per cent and 20 per cent of it respectively; Kepler-16b orbits them every 229 days.

Notwithstanding the lifelessness,Kepler-16bs discovery is otherwise significant too. It confirms a new class of planetary systems that could harbour life,since the opportunities for life are claimed to be greater in binary systems most stars in our galaxy are so than on planets orbiting single stars. Are we,of the single sunset,just plain lucky to be here then?