A Breakthrough Years in the Making

The Northwestern team uncovered the new exoplanet by revisiting data collected years earlier. While still a Ph.D. student, Wang played a key role in commissioning the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), a cutting-edge instrument designed to photograph distant planets by suppressing the blinding glare of their host stars. Initially deployed at the Gemini South telescope in Chile, GPI employs adaptive optics and a coronagraph to capture sharper images of faint planets orbiting bright stars.

Figure 1. Rare ‘Tatooine-Like’ Exoplanet Spotted Orbiting Two Suns.

Nearly a decade later, Wang asked Jones to reexamine the old data. GPI is currently undergoing upgrades and, next year, will be relocated to Hawaii for installation on the Gemini North telescope atop Mauna Kea. As GPI’s first chapter in Chile came to a close, Wang felt it was time to finalize his initial planet-hunting efforts. Figure 1 shows Rare ‘Tatooine-Like’ Exoplanet Spotted Orbiting Two Suns.

“I didn’t expect to find any new planets,” Wang admitted. “But I wanted to make sure we thoroughly checked everything.”

Tracking a Curious Object

Jones reviewed GPI data collected between 2016 and 2019 and cross-referenced it with observations from the W.M. Keck Observatory, using Northwestern’s institutional access. This past summer, she noticed something intriguing: a faint object that consistently appeared to follow the motion of a star across the sky.

“Stars don’t stand still in a galaxy; they move around,” Wang explained. “We track objects and revisit them later to see if they’ve shifted. If a planet is gravitationally bound to a star, it will move with that star. Sometimes, what appears to be a planet turns out to be a background star just passing through. If an object moves in sync with its star, that’s a strong sign it’s truly an orbiting planet.”

“We also analyze the light emitted by an object,” Jones added. “We can distinguish the light from a star versus a planet. Comparing the data, we found that this object’s light profile matched what we expect from a planet.”

To the team’s surprise, Jones confirmed that the suspicious object captured by GPI in 2016 was indeed a planet—it had simply gone unnoticed in earlier analyses. Around the same time, a European team led by astronomers at the University of Exeter independently identified the same planet through their own data reanalysis, corroborating Jones’ discovery.

Born After the Dinosaurs

The confirmed exoplanet is enormous—six times the mass of Jupiter. While hotter than any planet in our solar system, it’s relatively cool compared to other exoplanets imaged directly. Located about 446 light-years from Earth, Wang describes its distance as “not in our local neighborhood, but like the next town over.”

“That may sound ancient, but it’s only 50 million years after the dinosaurs went extinct,” Wang noted. “In the universe’s timeline, that’s quite young, so it still retains heat from its formation.”

The team was also struck by the planet’s orbit relative to its host stars. The stars themselves form a tight binary, completing one revolution around each other in just 18 Earth days. The planet, in contrast, takes roughly 300 years to orbit the pair—slightly longer than Pluto’s orbit around our Sun.

“You have a really tight binary, where the stars dance around each other rapidly, and then a slow-moving planet orbiting far out,” Wang explained.

Source: SciTECHDaily

Cite this article:

Priyadharshini S (2025), Stunning Discovery: Exoplanet Caught Orbiting Two Suns Like ‘Tatooin, AnaTechMaz, pp.648