Tatooine, Luke Skywalker’s home planet, in Star Wars: A New Hope.

DTM Staff Scientist Alan Boss, along with a team of researchers, has discovered a planet that orbits around a pair of stars.  Their findings of a so-called circumbinary planet will be published September 16 in Science.

A planet with two suns may be a familiar sight to fans of the “Star Wars” film series, but not, until now, to scientists.

The team, led by Laurance Doyle of the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life of the SETI Institute, used photometric data from the NASA Kepler space telescope, which monitors the brightness of 155,000 stars.

Detailed information on this finding can be found on Carnegie Institution for Science’s press release.