Cosmic Perspectives from Amid the Stars:
Astronomy Blog

One of the most iconic scenes in Star Wars is the famous twin sunset over Tatooine, a desert planet that orbits not one, but two stars. Science fiction often takes creative liberties with its fantastic planets, but what about this one? Can a planet really have two suns?

How likely is it that there are intelligent civilizations out there beyond our Solar System? This is the question that Frank Drake asked in 1961 when he came up with the eponymous Drake Equation. In the search for extraterrestrial life, finding an intelligent civilization that we might even be able to communicate with is the gold standard. We might not have found any yet, but given our knowledge of how the universe works, we should be able to predict how common or rare they a

For as long as humans have been telling stories, we’ve dreamed of worlds beyond our own. Today those worlds are no longer mere stories. We live in a golden age of exoplanet discovery. An exoplanet is any planet that exists beyond our Solar System, and since the 1990s, we’ve confirmed over 6,000 of them. It’s safe to assume that planets would exist around other stars. After all, there’s nothing special about the Sun. It’s a very average star.