Sunrises and sunsets with two suns.

Imagine being on a planet and enjoying double sunrises and sunsets, it's called HD143811 (AB) b, I know, horrible name, I'll call you Tatooine, but this ugly name has a reason, HD143811 this part refers to the star system, in this case it is star system number 143811 in the Henry Draper catalog, that's why HD, who was one of the first astronomers to analyze photographs of stars to catalog them.

And the other part (AB) b refers to the bodies that compose it, capital A and B refers to its two stars, A is assigned to the brightest one and B to the other, and the lower case B refers to the planet that orbits it, if more planets were found in that system, they would be assigned the letters that follow C, D, lower case E and so on, it is an exoplanet, exo means external, or sea, outside our solar system.

To date we have found more than 6,000 exoplanets orbiting nearby stars. 6,061 to be exact at the time I was researching for this publication, but this is the first time that an exoplanet in a binary system has been discovered through images, that is, a star system that has two stars instead of one like our solar system.

Using data from the Gemini South telescope and the Very Large Telescope in Chile, images of this binary system were collected over 9 years, from 2016 to 2025 and put together the animation shown above, where we can see the small planet rotating around the two stars, in the images, the two stars are purposely hidden to block their light, which would not allow us to see the small exoplanet.

Although it has nothing when it is small, it is a gas giant that has 6.1 times the mass of Jupiter. These images of a blurry dot turning around do not seem like much, but they are enough for astronomers to discover many things; First of all, it takes a long time to go around its stars, the Earth takes 365.25 days to go around the Sun, that defines the length of our year. but the exoplanet HD143811 (AB) b takes 320 years to make a complete revolution around its two stars.

In the animation you can see the little bit of orbit that it managed to travel in the 9 years that we were observing it, although on the scale of the universe this exoplanet is just around the corner, but it is 446 light years away, they also estimated the temperature of its surface, but we know that gaseous planets do not have a surface, but the upper clouds have a temperature of 1000º Kelvin, which is equivalent to 726ºC, quite warm, especially considering that it is located 63 times further from their suns than we are from our sun, so its warmth is its own, generated by the gravitational pressure that crushes its core.

They also calculated that Tatooine is a very young planet, it is barely 13 million years old, practically a baby compared to Earth. And its stars are also little girls, they are barely 21 million years old, to give you an idea, our Moon, which is younger than the Earth, is 4.5 billion years old.

Its stars are a little larger and hotter than our sun, star B has 1.15 solar masses, that is, a little more mass than our sun, and star A has 1.32 solar masses, our sun is a star classified as a yellow dwarf due to the color of its temperature, the coldest stars are red and are classified as type M with temperatures between 2,500 to 3,500º Kelvin, our sun is a yellow star type G of 5º and the The hottest stars are type O with temperatures between 28,000 and 50,000ºKelvin, which are very bright and blue. The new Tatooine stars are whiter than the sun because they are a little hotter.

Although a sky with two suns seems like something out of science fiction to us, in reality binary systems are very common, it is estimated that 85% of stars exist in multiple systems, that is, with two stars or more and systems with a solitary star like ours are rarer, one more reason to appreciate our sun and that is that the more stars it has, the less stable the systems are, hence the science fiction novel and the subsequent series that develops around the problem of the three bodies, where they try to find a configuration of a triple star system that is stable enough for life to be possible on one of its planets.

If on Earth, with a single star and an almost circular orbit, temperature changes between seasons become uncomfortable, imagine a system like this.

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