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takyon writes:

A research model indicates that Earth-like planets orbiting at a sufficient distance from a binary star's barycenter could support liquid water and habitable conditions:

If an Earth-size planet were orbiting two suns, could it support life? It turns out, such a planet could be quite hospitable if located at the right distance from its two stars, and wouldn't necessarily even have deserts. In a particular range of distances from two sun-like host stars, a planet covered in water would remain habitable and retain its water for a long time, according to a new study in the journal Nature Communications.

"This means that double-star systems of the type studied here are excellent candidates to host habitable planets, despite the large variations in the amount of starlight hypothetical planets in such a system would receive," said Max Popp, associate research scholar at Princeton University in New Jersey, and the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany.

Climate variations on Earth-like circumbinary planets (open, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms14957) (DX)

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