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Luke Skywalker's planet orbited two stars. How about brown dwarfs instead?

WASHINGTON � In a memorable image from the 1977 film "Star Wars," the young hero Luke Skywalker gazes at two suns setting above the horizon on his desert planet Tatooine. Astronomers since then indeed have discovered worlds, called circumbinary planets, orbiting two stars.

But for sheer exoticism, it would be hard to top a newly described circumbinary planet located relatively nearby in our Milky Way galaxy. It orbits not two stars but two brown dwarfs, celestial objects too small to be a star and too big to be a planet. And its orbit is unlike any other such planet on record.



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