Scientists have discovered an exoplanet that orbits two “suns” just like Luke Skywalker’s home planet Tatooine. Indirect observations show that the highly unusual binary system has two brown dwarfs at its center alongside the planet 2M1510 – and all three of the bodies exhibit curious behavior. Brown dwarfs occupy a strange middle ground among celestial bodies: too large to be planets, but too small to qualify as true stars. “The system […] provides strong, if indirect, evidence for the existence of one of the most exotic types of exoplanetary systems yet found,” Keivan Stassun writes in a related Focus. More than three-quarters of the nearly 6,000 exoplanets known today belong to stellar systems that look very different from Earth’s solar system. The rarest systems feature exoplanets, like the fictional Tatooine in Star Wars, that orbit around two central bodies, called a binary system. To date, only 15 Tatooine-like exoplanetary systems have been found. Now, Thomas Baycroft and colleagues have found an extremely unusual exoplanet called 2M1510 that eccentrically orbits around two central brown dwarfs. To make the discovery, they used radial velocity calculations to evaluate data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). This approach enabled them to overcome the 3-body problem, which refers to the challenges in predicting gravity’s behavior when three objects interact in space. Baycroft et al. determined that 2M1510 orbits at a polar angle of 90 degrees, moving perpendicular to the central dwarfs’ orbits in a way previously not seen. Even more remarkable, the two central brown dwarfs are eclipsing. This means that either of the two will always be partially blocked when seen from Earth. Researchers only know of one other eclipsing brown dwarf binary system. Additionally, 2M1510’s system also contains another distant brown dwarf on its outskirts. In the Focus, Stassun suggests that this indicates the system once had three brown dwarfs in its center before two of the dwarfs eventually propelled the third to the edges.