OSU researcher helps discover “real life Tatooine,” the fictional planet from Star Wars

Your dreams of living out the “Star Wars” saga may not be long-gone after all.

Yesterday, Ohio State announced that David Martin, the NASA Sagan fellow at the Ohio State University Department of Astronomy co-authored a study that confirmed the existence of a real-life Tatooine, the fictional home planet of Luke Skywalker from “Star Wars” that featured two suns.

The study explored a technique known as the radial velocity method, which involves analyzing the  spectrum of light created by stars.

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The planet, which is known as Kepler-16b, is a “gas giant” roughly the same size as Saturn, and is located 245 light years away from the Earth. Researchers already knew about the existence of Kepler-16b, but the study applied the radial velocity method to observe a planet orbiting two stars, a real life version of Tatooine.

“It’s a confirmation that our method works,” Martin said. “And it creates an opportunity for us to apply this method now to identify other systems like this.”

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