Watching two suns over Tatooine's sky in the original Star Wars movie was a breathtaking experience, particularly given where most science fiction films were at the time. Here was an attempt to convey a truly alien landscape. But a second thought quickly came unbidden. Was this planet not in an extremely unstable orbit, moving around both stars simultaneously in an obvious habitable zone? The suspicion was that a planet could orbit one or the other members of a binary system, but surely not both unless its orbit were extended so far out into the planetary nether regions as to make life doubtful. Image: The twin suns of Tatooine. Are planetary orbits like this possible? Credit: © Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved. That was back in the 1970s, of course, but take a look at the situation today. The 'hot Jupiter' in the triple system HD 188753 is interesting, but the planet in question orbits but one of the stars. The early discussion of HD 188753 Ab was quick to raise the Tatooine...

We're still arguing about how giant planets form around Sun-like stars, but terrestrial planets seem to be less controversial. Assuming the model is right, we start with a swarm of planetesimals in the range of one kilometer in size. As these objects grow, out to a range of at least 2 AU, the largest bodies at some point go through a runaway period of chaotic growth marked by collisions. Emerging from the debris should be terrestrial worlds, some in Earth-like orbits. Add to this the fact that gas and dust disks seem to be relatively routine outcomes of star formation and you have an indication that small rocky planets may be widespread. The problem with all this is that theory has to be matched with observation. On that score, new work by Mike Meyer (University of Arizona) and colleagues Lynne Hillenbrand and John Carpenter (California Institute of Technology) is instructive. The researchers chose to look at mid-range infrared emissions at the 24 micron level, a range chosen because...