This is an image of a transit of Kepler 16. What that means is that, from where we’re sitting, it looks like the 16th planet discovered by the Kepler mission is moving (transiting) in front of the star it orbits. Or, in this case, stars – Kepler 16 has two suns.
The planet, called Kepler-16b, is the most “Tatooine-like” planet yet found in our galaxy. Tatooine is the name of Luke Skywalker’s home world in the science fiction movie Star Wars. In this case, the planet is not thought to be habitable. It is a cold world, with a gaseous surface, but like Tatooine, it circles two stars. The largest of the two stars, a K dwarf, is about 69 percent the mass of our sun, and the smallest, a red dwarf, is about 20 percent the sun’s mass.
Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt.