HONG KONG: One of the most eerily alien images in the Star Wars saga involves neither light sabres nor Tie fighters – it’s a simple shot of Luke Skywalker watching a binary sunset on his homeworld, Tatooine.
Astronomers have for more than a decade dismissed this as yet another example of Hollywood getting the science wrong. Small rocky planets (like Earth, Venus, Mars, and Mercury) just couldn’t form around twins.
Tidal forces as the stars orbited around each other would disrupt the motion of small particles, preventing them from gently merging together into larger agglomerations, they thought.
To date, only gas giants have been found around binary stars, though that could be because it’s much easier to find gas giants than small rocky planets.
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