Astronomers just found something unique in the Milky Way–a giant exoplanet in a 200-days orbit around two stars.
In a find that remind us of that binary sunset in the original Star Wars movie, the Tatooine-like “TIC 172900988b” is a Jupiter-sized planet.
Known as a “circumbinary” planet, TIC 172900988b’s existence has been revealed in a paper published in the Astronomical Journal by a team led by Veselin B. Kostov of the SETI Institute.
Although not unique in being a circumbinary planet–astronomers have found 14 such bodies so far–it’s the most massive transiting circumbinary planet to date.
It’s also the first to be found using a single set of data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) all-sky survey space telescope.
However, finding it wasn’t easy.
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