Just figured this was kind of neat

[LEFT] [/COLOR] The existence of a world with a double sunset, as portrayed in the film Star Wars more than 30 years ago, is now scientific fact. NASA's Kepler mission has made the first unambiguous detection of a circumbinary planet -- a planet orbiting two stars -- 200 light-years from Earth. [/COLOR][/LEFT]

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/news/kepler-16b.html

That's crazy. My first reaction was "I figured they had already discovered such a thing," and then I realized how recently it was we actually confirmed an exoplanet.

It was already scientific fact. Facts don't become facts because we discover them.

If you're gonna be a pedantic dick about it, at least get it right.

Awesome pictures. Also look at the size of that thing, etc.

My response exactly. Mediocre minds think alike!



Although this is true, we could also make an epistemological case along the lines of "If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?"

In other news, thanks for ninja'ing me on saying this so you got called a pedantic dick instead of me.



Casual off-the-cuff Star Wars quotes for the win!

That's no binary star system... it's a space station!

So, from what I briefly read, the smaller sun just orbits the bigger one much like a planet?

Yes. We would be a binary system if Jupiter hadn't been such a lazy ****up.

Saturn always said he'd never amount to anything. Not like his goody two shoes brother Neptune.

On the other side of the coin, we would also be on and possibly made out of fire.

LOL love it. And I applaud your knowledge of Greco-Roman mythology.

I think you're a bit confused about what was discovered here. They did not discover a binary star system- they already knew that the system was binary. My understanding is that binary star systems actually out number single star systems in the Universe, so the discovery of one isn't really big news.

What was discovered was a planet that is orbiting both stars. As far as I know, this is a first. Plenty of planets have been discovered in binary systems before, but up until now, all of those found were orbiting only one of the two stars.

"Scientific fact" literally means "known fact." The existence of the planet was fact, but it was not knowledge.

Jupiter would need to be many times more massive in order to become a star.

Correct.