We won’t have to travel 20,000 light years, however, to visit icy worlds. The onetime event revealing the distant Hoth was captured by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, or OGLE, and confirmed by other instruments.

The planet lies toward the heart of the Milky Way, where a greater density of stars makes microlensing events more likely. In microlensing, back light from a distant star is used to reveal planets around a star closer to us. Astronomers used an extraordinary planet-finding technique known as microlensing to find this world in 2005, one of the early demonstrations of this technique’s ability to reveal exoplanets.

That most likely means no Hoth-style tauntauns to ride, or even formidably fanged abominable snowmen (aka wampas). Unable to grow large enough, it had to settle for a mass five times that of Earth and a surface locked in the deepest of deep freezes, with a surface temperature estimated at minus 364 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 220 Celsius). The planet OGLE-2005-BLG-390, nicknamed Hoth, is a cold super-Earth that might be a failed Jupiter. The ice planet OGLE-2005-BLG-390 is nicknamed Hoth, after the fictional frozen tundra world. The starlight shining through the atmospheres of these planets could reveal their composition in future observations. Astronomers using K2, the second planet-finding mission of the Kepler space telescope, detected three such planets orbiting a nearby dwarf star. And tasting the atmospheres of smaller, rocky, potentially habitable exoplanets soon could be within reach. In our galaxy, emerging technology allows us to read out the components of real exoplanet atmospheres– including gas giants (though so far no signs of habitable bands). This not-so-hot Jupiter, about 186 light-years away, was detected using the 11.8-foot (3.6-meter) telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile.īespin’s atmospheric layers include a band of breathable air, ideal for floating cities. The star, HIP 11915, is about the same age and composition as our Sun, raising the possibility that its entire planetary system might be similar to ours.

An international astronomical team discovered a twin of our own Jupiter, orbiting its star at about the same distance as Jupiter is from the sun. One recent discovery, however, shows that gas “exogiants” can orbit their stars at distances remarkably similar to those in our solar system. Many of the gas giants found so far by instruments such as NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope are so-called “hot Jupiters”– star-hugging behemoths far too thoroughly barbecued to be proper sites for floating cities.

Starwars galaxy at war