NASA finds 25+ circumbinary planets

Circumbinary planets are the real-life Tatooines — worlds that orbit two suns instead of one. They’re rare in our catalogs, but probably not rare in space. The problem has been detection. Most of the ones we know showed up only because they crossed in front of their stars from exactly the right angle. Now a new TESS-based study says that bias may have hidden a much bigger population, and it has surfaced 27 fresh candidates. (academic.oup.com) ### What actually got found? Not 27 confirmed planets — 27 candidate circumbinary planets. The paper, published online March 14, 2026 in *Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society*, looked at binary-star systems observed by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, and flagged cases where an unseen companion seems to be tugging on the st(academic.oup.com) may be too massive to count as ordinary planets. (academic.oup.com) ### Why are two-star planets so hard to find? Transit searches love tidy geometry. A planet has to pass in front of its star from our line of sight, and with circumbinary systems that geometry is messier because the stars are moving around each other too. That means the clean, repeating dimming pattern astronomers use for single-star planets often turns into an (academic.oup.com)ts varied in timing, depth, and duration because the planet was crossing a moving target. (nasa.gov) ### So what did this team do instead? They looked for apsidal precession. Basically, the binary stars’ orbit slowly swivels over time. Some of that swivel is expected from relativity, tides, and the stars’ own rotation. But in 27 systems, the measured precession looked too large to explain that way, which points to an extra gravitational perturber — potential(nasa.gov)e the people you can see keep shifting in a pattern they shouldn’t. (academic.oup.com) ### How big was the search? Pretty big. The team analyzed TESS photometry for 1,590 eclipsing binaries drawn from the Gaia DR3 eclipsing-binary catalog. That matters because older circumbinary finds came from a much narrower slice of systems — mostly the ones aligned closely enough for transits. This method doesn’t need that same lucky alignment, so it opens a wider search lane. (academic.oup.com) ### Does this mean NASA now “found 25+ planets”? Not in the confirmed-planet sense. NASA’s Exoplanet Archive listed 6,278 confirmed exoplanets as of April 30, 2026, but these 27 new objects are not in that bucket yet. They’re strong candidates inferred from dynamics, and the paper is explicit about the catch — the same signal can come from a lower-mass planet cl(academic.oup.com)t tie. (exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu) ### Why is the number such a big deal? Because the known sample has been tiny. A 2025 *Science Advances* paper described only 16 known circumbinary exoplanets, and the new TESS study notes just 14 had been found via transits. Add 27 credible candidates on top of that and you’re suddenly talking about a possible doubling — or more — of the sample astronomers can study. That’s the difference between a curiosity and a population. (science.org) ### What could change if these hold up? The big shift is statistical. Right now, our picture of circumbinary planets is skewed toward systems that are nearly coplanar and easy to catch in transit. If this precession method keeps working, astronomers can start asking the real questions — how common these planets are, how far out they orbit, and whether binary stars build planetary systems differently from single stars like the Sun. (academic.oup.com) ### Bottom line The news is not that NASA suddenly confirmed 27 new Tatooines. It’s that TESS data just produced 27 plausible leads using a smarter search trick — one that may finally get around the geometry problem that has kept two-sun worlds looking rarer than they really are. (academic.oup.com)