Star Wars: 10 Things Everyone Forgets About Tatooine

10. Real World Allegories

When creating the world of Star Wars, George Lucas often drew from the world around him and, as celestial bodies go, it turns out that planets like Tatooine aren’t as uncommon as people might believe. In the earlier drafts of the script, the name of the planet that the droids land on was constantly in flux. At one point, it was Aquilae, and later Utapau. While they were scouting locations, Lucas came across a small city in Tunisia called Tataouine in French. George chose the name Tatooine for his desert planet, and two of Tatooine's moons Ghomrassen and Chenini are named after real villages in Tunisia

On September 15, 2011, a planet was discovered with two suns. Called Kepler-16b by NASA, the planet is 200 light years away from Earth in the Constellation Cygnus. It should be visible to amateur astronomers according to researchers. On January 11, 2012, two more gas giants were discovered orbiting two suns. Kepler-34b obits each sun every 289 days and is as far away from its two suns as our Earth is from ours. Kepler-34b is located 4900 light years from Earth.

The other gas giant is Kepler-35b, which orbits each star every 131 days at less than 60% of the distance of the space between the Earth and our sun. The suns of Kepler-35b are smaller than our sun and are located 5400 light years away from Earth.