{"id":468474,"date":"2026-05-04T20:47:17","date_gmt":"2026-05-04T20:47:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/468474\/"},"modified":"2026-05-04T20:47:17","modified_gmt":"2026-05-04T20:47:17","slug":"astronomers-spot-dozens-of-potential-tatooine-worlds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/468474\/","title":{"rendered":"Astronomers Spot Dozens of Potential \u2018Tatooine\u2019 Worlds"},"content":{"rendered":"

The existence of circumbinary planets<\/a> \u2014 exoplanets that orbit binary stars \u2014 has only been firmly established over the past 15 years. Observations from NASA\u2019s Kepler Space Telescope and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) have led to the detection<\/a> of 14 such planets using the transit method. Now, a novel technique applied to the TESS data has revealed 27 new circumbinary candidates, hinting that such exotic systems may be more common than once believed.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"An<\/p>\n

An artist\u2019s impression of a circumbinary exoplanet and its two parent stars. Image credit: Sci.News.<\/p>\n

The new planet candidates range from objects that could be as small as the mass of Neptune to 10x as large as the mass of Jupiter.<\/p>\n

The closest is about 650 light-years away from Earth, and the furthest about 18,000 light-years away.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe candidates are scattered across both our southern and northern skies,\u201d said University of New South Wales astronomer Ben Montet, co-author of the study.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis means that any time of the year, no matter when you\u2019re looking, at least one of these star systems is out there visible for you to look towards \u2014 as long as you have a telescope.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe found 27 planet candidates out of 1,590 binary star systems, which is an almost 2% rate of binary systems that could potentially host planets.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat implies there could potentially be thousands, or tens of thousands, of possible planets to be found with data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory\u2019s new 10-year sky survey, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo it\u2019s a really exciting first step \u2014 and it also shows that there\u2019s going to be a lot of work to do over the next few years.\u201d<\/p>\n

The team\u2019s new planet-finding method, called apsidal precession, has been used to characterize binary stars before, but not in a large-scale search for exoplanets.<\/p>\n

It involves monitoring how the binary stars\u2019 orbit of one other \u2014 made visible by their stellar eclipses \u2014 change over long periods of time.<\/p>\n

If there\u2019s a variation in their eclipse schedule that can\u2019t be explained by general relativity or stellar interactions, it means a third body could be influencing the stars\u2019 orbits \u2014 and that body could be a planet.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost of our current knowledge on planets is biased, based on how we\u2019ve looked for them,\u201d said lead author Margo Thornton, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of New South Wales.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve mostly found the easiest ones to detect.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis new method could help us uncover a large population of hidden planets, especially those that don\u2019t line up perfectly from our line of sight.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt could help reveal what the true population of planets in our Universe might look like.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m excited about the potential for how many planets we could find with this method,\u201d Dr. Montet said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wasn\u2019t expecting to find 27 already at this point from the pilot study.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNow we get to start the really fun project of figuring out which ones are real planets.\u201d<\/p>\n

The team\u2019s results<\/a> appear in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.<\/p>\n

_____<\/p>\n

Margo Thornton et al. 2026. Detection of 27 candidate circumbinary planets through apsidal precession of eclipsing binaries observed by TESS. MNRAS 548 (3): stag515; doi: 10.1093\/mnras\/stag515<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The existence of circumbinary planets \u2014 exoplanets that orbit binary stars \u2014 has only been firmly established over…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":468475,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[77],"tags":[205636,19915,205637,18,18060,19,17,1024,133,98307],"class_list":{"0":"post-468474","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-apsidal-precession","9":"tag-binary-star","10":"tag-circumbinary-planet","11":"tag-eire","12":"tag-exoplanet","13":"tag-ie","14":"tag-ireland","15":"tag-nasa","16":"tag-science","17":"tag-tess"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116518273305166142","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=468474"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468474\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/468475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=468474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=468474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=468474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}