Evidence of planetary debris surrounding a double sun, 'Tatooine-like' system has been found for the first time by a UCL-led team of researchers.
Published today in Nature Astronomy and funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council and the European Research Council, the study finds the remains of shattered asteroids orbiting a double sun consisting of a white dwarf and a brown dwarf roughly 1000 light-years away in a system called SDSS 1557.
The discovery is remarkable because the debris appears to be rocky and suggests that terrestrial planets like Tatooine - Luke Skywalker's home world in Star Wars - might exist in the system. To date, all exoplanets discovered in orbit around double stars are gas giants, similar to Jupiter, and are thought to form in the icy regions of their systems.
In contrast to the carbon-rich icy material found in other double star systems, the planetary material identified in the SDSS 1557 system has a high metal content, including silicon and magnesium. These elements were identified as the debris flowed from its orbit onto the surface of the star, polluting it temporarily with at least 1017 g (or 1.1 trillion US tons) of matter, equating it to an asteroid at least 4 km in size.https://phys.org/news/2017-02-evidence-rocky-planet-formation-tatooine.html?utm_source=nwletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily-nwletterDespite the headline I don't think this would lead to any planets anything like Tatooine. The result would probably be a lot more like our Kuiper belt objects.
