With two suns in its sky, Luke Skywalker's home planet Tatooine in Star Wars looks like a parched, sandy desert world. In real life, thanks to observatories such as NASA's Kepler space telescope, we know that two-star systems can indeed support planets, although planets discovered so far around double-star systems are large and gaseous. Scientists wondered: If an Earth-size planet were orbiting two suns, could it support life?

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This artist's concept shows a hypothetical planet covered in water around the binary star system of Kepler-35A and B.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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