Phoenix Planets: Some 'Tatooine' Worlds May Rise from Stellar Ashes

"Because of the challenges they present, binary stars have been for a long time neglected," Mariangela Bonavita, a researcher at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, told Space.com. Bonavita examined a number of stellar surveys, including The Search for Planets Orbiting Two Stars (SPOTS), to which Bonavita contributed, to hunt for worlds around pairs of stars. "That's changing now, thanks to direct imaging, and also thanks to [NASA's] Kepler spacecraft," she said.