WASHINGTON: In a memorable image from the 1977 film `Star Wars,` the young hero Luke Skywalker gazes at two suns setting above the horizon on his desert planet Tatooine. Astronomers since then indeed have discovered worlds, called circumbinary planets, orbiting two stars.

But for sheer exoticism, it would be hard to top a newly described circumbinary planet located relatively nearby in our Milky Way galaxy. It orbits not two stars but two brown dwarfs celestial objects too small to be a star and too big to be a planet. And its orbit is unlike any other such planet on record.

Brown dwarfs could be considered wannabe stars that during their formative stages did not reach the mass necessary to ignite nuclearfusion at their core like a star. But they are more massive than the biggest planets and are modestly luminous.

Using the European Southern Observatory`s Chile-based VeryLarge Telescope, researchers have found evidence of a planet roughly 120 light-years away probably a gas planet at least four or five times the mass of Earth orbiting two brown dwarfs, each about 35 times more massive than Jupiter. A lightyear is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles. Jupiter is our solar system`s largest planet.

The two brown dwarfs are gravitationally bound and orbit near to each other as close as just 4 per cent of the distance between Earth and the sun. The planet, named 2M1510 (AB) b, orbits around this pair. Another brown dwarf is present in this system, but is too far away about 250 times the distance between Earth and the sun for its gravitational pull to measurably disturb the other two.

Of the approximately 5,800 planets beyond our solar system called exoplanets confirmed to date, only 16 are circumbinary.

And until now, none of those were found to be orbiting brown dwarfs,ratherthan regular stars.

The nature of this planet`s orbit also is unique. Rather than following the plane established for the orbit of the two brown dwarfs, the planet instead orbits almost nearly perpendicular from the plane called a polar orbit in a journey lasting atleast100 days.

`A satellite on a polar orbit around the Earth is one that would pass over the north and south pole.

It would therefore be on an orbit that is inclined at 90 degrees to the rotation axis of the Earth,` said Thomas Baycroft, a doctoral student in astronomy at the University of Birmingham in England and lead author of the study published in the journal Science Advances.

No planet in our solar system has a polar orbit. The several exoplanets known to follow such a path orbit only a single star. When two stars, or in this case two brown dwarfs, orbit each other, it is called a binary system, like the fictional one in `Star Wars.`-Reuters