Second Earth' Found? Planet Kepler-453B is Like Tatooine in 'Star Wars' [Photos]

Similar to the planet Tatooine in “Star Wars,” the newly discovered real-life planet, Kepler-453b, reportedly has two suns.

NBC News reported that Kepler-453b is situated in the habitable zone of its stars. Scientists believe that the planet is a gas giant, which means that life is not possible on its surface, but it is not unlikely that there are existing organisms.

"It could have moons that are rocky, which means you could have life on the moons in this system," stated Stephen Kane, one of the astronomy researchers at San Francisco State University.

One year on Kepler-453b is equivalent to 240 days on Earth. In one year, the planet orbits two stars. One star is 94 percent the size of the Earth’s sun, while the second is 20 percent of the sun’s size. The smaller star emits only 1 percent of the energy produced by the bigger star. Kepler 453-b is the 10th circumbinary planet discovered, which means that it orbits two stars in a year.

According to scientists, the radius of Kepler-453b is 6.2 times greater compared to the Earth’s radius. Its large size led to the researchers saying that it was a gas giant, and not a rocky planet that is capable of support life, like Earth. If the planet has rocky moons, it is possible that it is habitable.

According to the scientists, the discovery of Kepler-453b was actually due to perfect timing. Planets are usually found when these move between their sun and Earth. The planet is spotted as it passes in front of its sun, dimming the star’s light. The gravitational pull of the two stars of Kepler-453b makes the planet detectable only nine percent of the time. If the scientists did not discover the planet recently, its next visibility would have been in 2066, The Washington Post revealed.

"If we had observed this planet earlier or later than we did, we would have seen nothing and assumed there was no planet there. That suggests that there are a lot more of these kinds of planets than we are thinking, and we're just looking at the wrong time,” stated study author Stephen Kane of San Francisco State University in an article by Eurekalert.

Kane said that they did not know circumbinary systems can exist until they discovered Kepler. Since then, they have been spotting these in bigger numbers. The first two-star system was found in 2011 by the Kepler Mission.