This Is The Binary Star Planet We Were Looking For

have confirmed what it seemed inevitable: a planet orbiting a binary star. It’s no Tatooine but a Saturn-sized gas planet twisting around two stars about 1.5 and 4.5 smaller than our sun.

The stars orbit around each other every 41 days, while the planet — boringly called Kepler-16b — completes one orbit every 229 Earth days. According to the discovery, they share the same orbital plane, which indicates that they formed from the same spinning disk of matter. [Science via MB]