Star Wars-like planetary system discovered

London: Scientists have for the first time found evidence of a Tatooine-like rocky planetary system - Luke Skywalker's home world in the Star Wars series - about 1,000 light-years away. The system called SDSS 1557 consists of the remains of shattered asteroids orbiting a double sun consisting of a white dwarf and a brown dwarf, researchers said.

The discovery led by researchers at University College London (UCL) in the UK is remarkable because the debris appears to be rocky and suggests that terrestrial planets like Tatooine might exist in the system. To date, all exoplanets discovered in orbit around double stars are gas giants, similar to Jupiter, and are thought to form in the icy regions of their systems.

In contrast to the carbon-rich icy material found in other double star systems, the planetary material identified in the SDSS 1557 system has a high metal content, including silicon and magnesium. These elements were identified as the debris flowed from its orbit onto the surface of the star, polluting it temporarily with at least 1.1 trillion tonnes of matter, equating it to an asteroid at least four kilometres in size.