It’s days like today that are particularly good for imagining skipping off this planet to find a better one. And it appears that more and more places aren’t just capable of having planets but are capable of having habitable planets. New research, published in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences with corresponding author Dr. Nikolaos Georgakarakos, describes five binary star systems capable of supporting habitable planets. Basically, if you want to watch two suns rise, these are the places you place a planet. According to Georgakarakos: Life is far most likely to evolve on planets located within their system’s Habitable Zone, just like Earth. Here we investigate whether a Habitable Zone exists within nine known systems with two or more stars orbited by giant planets. We show for the first time that Kepler-34, -35, -64, -413, and especially Kepler-38 are suitable for hosting Earth-like worlds with oceans. 

These worlds haven’t been detected, yet. Small worlds are hard to find and larger orbits just add time to the problem, but these are places to look where we know planets in other orbits exist. So yes, Tatooine may be totally out there, or at least its double sunset over a desert may be something we can one day see.

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EurekAlert article

“Circumbinary Habitable Zones in the Presence of a Giant Planet,” Nikolaos Georgakarakos, Siegfried Eggl, and Ian Dobbs-Dixon, 2021 April 15, Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Science