David Kipping

I'm trying hard to not anthropomorphize the relationship that stars have with each other.

It depends if we're talking about the stars or the planets.

Certainly, if stars couple up, that has a big influence on the habitability.

Of course, this is very famous from Star Wars.

Tatooine in Star Wars is a binary star system.

And you have Luke Skywalker looking at the sunset and seeing two stars come down.

And for years, we thought that was purely a product of George Lucas's incredibly creative mind.

And we...

didn't think that planets would exist around binary star systems.

It seems like too tumultuous an environment for a quiescent planetary disc, circumstellar disc, to form planets from.

And yet, one of the astounding discoveries from Kepler was that these appear to be quite common.

In fact, as far as we can tell, they're just as common around binary stars as single stars.

The only caveat to that is that you don't get planets close into binary stars.

They have a clearance region on the inside where planets, maybe they form there, but they don't last.

are dynamically unstable in that zone.

But once you get out to about the distance that the Earth orbits the Sun, or even a little bit closer in, you start to find planets emerging.

And so that's the right distance for liquid water, the right distance for potentially life on those planets.

And so there may very well be plenty of habitable planets around the binary stars.

Binary planets are a little bit different.

Binary planets, I don't think we have