Sadly, a John Williams song doesn’t play when the suns set there.

There are five systems more than trillions of miles away from Earth with multiple suns that might be hospitable for life.
If multiple suns brings to mind Luke Skywalker’s home planet of Tatooine in Star Wars, you wouldn’t be too far off. Four of these five systems are binary star systems, with one of them having at least four sun-like stars rotating around each other at a central point. This news comes by way of a new report published by the team of scientists who claim they’ve discovered evidence that these five systems in question could possibly support life, as reported by Cnet.
The five systems are known as Kepler-34, Kepler-35, Kepler-38, Kepler-64, and Kepler-413. The system with at least four sun-like stars is Kepler-64 while the scientific team says the other four have two suns, like Tatooine. Don’t expect anyone in our lifetime, however, to reach these systems as they’re between 2764 and 5933 light years away from Earth, according to Cnet, and one light year is equal to about 6 trillion miles. Let that math break your brain for a second.
Each of these systems have at least one “giant planet the size of Neptune” or larger, according to Cnet, and each has what’s called a “habitable zone,” which is a region where liquid water might be present.
“Life is far most likely to evolve on planets located within their system’s habitable zone, just like Earth,” report co-author, Nikolaos Georgakarakos, said in a release, as reported by Cnet. “Here we investigate whether a habitable zone exists within nine known systems with two or more stars orbited by giant planets. We show for the first time that Kepler-34, -35, -64, -413, and especially Kepler-38 are suitable for hosting Earth-like worlds with oceans.”
According to Cnet, binary star systems like Kepler-34, -35, -413, -38, and the planet of Tatooine, are, “estimated to represent between half and three-quarters of all star systems, and only giant planets have been discovered in them so far.” Scientists believe that smaller, non-giant, Earth-like planets could be hiding from detection in these systems though.
“We’ve known for a while that binary star systems without giant planets have the potential to harbor habitable worlds,” report co-author, Ian Dobbs-Dixon, said in a release, as reported by Cnet. “What we have shown here is that in a large fraction of those systems, Earth-like planets can remain habitable even in the presence of giant planets.”
The team came to this conclusion by observing a number of factors in these five systems such as the, “class, mass, luminosity, and spectral energy distribution of the stars,” as well as the gravitational effect and impact of radiation these giant planets would have on a potential Earth-like planet, according to Cnet.
“Our best candidate for hosting a world that is potentially habitable is the binary system Kepler-38, approximately 3970 light years from Earth, and known to contain a Neptune-sized planet,” Georgakarakos said. “Our study confirms that even binary star systems with giant planets are hot targets in the search for Earth 2.0. Watch out Tatooine, we are coming.”
Maybe far, far away in the future humans will reach these star systems, but for now, us Earthlings will have to settle for simply watching movies featuring binary-sun planets like those found in Star Wars.
Speaking of Star Wars, check out every modern IGN review of Star Wars movies and then read IGN’s list of the 25 best sci-fi movies. Check out this story about possible signs of life detected on Venus after that and then read about how future possibilities for life on Mars continue with this discovery made in 2019.
Wesley LeBlanc is a freelance news writer, guide maker, and science guru for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @LeBlancWes.