The Twin Suns Potentially Suitable for Life

Orbital stability is insufficient, however. Two-thirds of the planets the pair modeled would be either too hot or too cold for liquid water at their surface throughout the orbit.

Nevertheless, 15 percent of the stable planets the pair modeled had habitable temperatures for at least 80 percent of their orbit. The percentage may seem too low but the team estimates that the oceans and atmosphere would not stabilize the temperature during a short pass near the star.

“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.