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“The existence of a world with a double sunset, as portrayed in the film Star Wars more than 30 years ago, is now scientific fact,” said the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on Thursday.

The US-based agency broke out the news that it had discovered a planet orbiting two suns, resembling the fictional planet Tattoine in the famous trilogy through its Kepler telescope.

Scientists however said that it is unlikely Luke Skywalker, or anyone at all, would be living on the planet, which is “cold, gaseous and not thought to harbor life.”

Named Kepler-16b, the planet lies some 200 light years from Earth.

“This discovery confirms that Kepler-16b is an inhospitable, cold world about the size of Saturn and thought to be made up of about half rock and half gas,” NASA said in a release.

Kepler-16b’s parent stars are also said to be smaller than Earth’s sun, with one of its stars only 69% of the sun while the other is only 20%.

“Kepler-16b orbits around both stars every 229 days, similar to Venus' 225-day orbit, but lies outside the system's habitable zone, where liquid water could exist on the surface, because the stars are cooler than our sun,” NASA said.

Despite the planet’s two suns, one cannot get constant daylight in Kepler-16b since the two stars are so close together, Alan Boss, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC and a member of the team that discovered the planet said in a Guardian report.

"They would come together in an eclipse every 20.5 days and then move apart again. As their separation increased, they would go down at different times, and that could make cocktail hour hard," Boss said.

However, Kepler principal investigator William Borucki meanwhile said that the discovery confirms that there is a “new class of planetary systems that could harbor life.”

The Kepler mission was launched in 2009 to scour the galaxy for Earth-size planets where liquid water can exist.