27 Potential Circumbinary Planets Discovered, Echoing Star Wars' Tatooine

A study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on May 4, 2026, reports the identification of 27 potential circumbinary planets—worlds orbiting two stars, like the fictional Tatooine from Star Wars. The research, led by astronomers including Margo Thornton of the University of New South Wales, analyzed data from 1,590 binary star systems collected by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. Using a technique called apsidal precession, which tracks eclipses in binary systems, the team found 27 candidates where a third body may be perturbing the stars' orbits. More than half of these potential planets are less massive than Jupiter. If confirmed, the discovery could more than double the known circumbinary planets, currently fewer than 20 out of over 6,000 confirmed exoplanets. The method had not previously been used in a large-scale planet search. Sara Webb, an astrophysicist at Swinburne University of Technology, noted the parallel between artistic imagination and scientific discovery. The finding contrasts with a December 2025 study in Astrophysical Journal Letters by Mohammad Farhat of UC Berkeley, which suggested planets are rarer in binary systems due to tidal disruption or ejection. Thornton hopes the new approach will uncover a hidden population of planets.