The Twin Suns Potentially Suitable for Life

“We find that potentially habitable CBPs tend to orbit close to binaries with small separation distances, but rarely orbit around binary stars that are similar in mass, as stable planets around such binaries are too cold,” the pair write.

In other words, we can forget about Tatooines or Magratheas orbiting “twin suns”. Instead, planets like these would have one large-sunlike star and one much fainter secondary.

Existing detection methods make it difficult to search for planets in binary systems, circumbinary or not, which may be why scientists have yet to find a planet, even near Alpha Centauri.