kat8noghosts:

jenniferrpovey:

just-shower-thoughts:

Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi are pretty pale for living on a desert planet with two suns.

That is a good point.

So, let’s look at it logically.

The Tatooine system contains two stars that orbit each other fairly closely, but probably no closer than a 7.4 day rotation period (we have reason to believe a tighter orbital period between the stars means too much instability for habitable planets).

It contains an unknown number of planets. Presumably, from the fact that they aren’t mentioned, Tatooine is the only habitable world in the system.

How do we know this? Because the daybreak scene on Tatooine shows the two suns rising together. This most likely means Tatooine orbits both of them.

Which means? The fact that it’s a binary system makes a pretty picture, but it doesn’t make an immediate difference to Tatooine. It might eventually - if the suns go unstable and infall into each other, then, well, time to get in the Millennium Falcon and leave. But during what is presumably a stable period (or the planet wouldn’t have a human population on it - presumably either the Jawas, the Tusken Raiders or both are the indigenes - it’s not actually anything to think about.

Now, in Earth hot deserts (and note that desert means “lack of water” and has nothing to do with temperature. The South Pole is a desert) which Tatooine was loosely based off, the OP would be right. They would be tanned pretty dark, Luke’s hair would probably be bleached almost white, etc. That would be caused by not the heat but the UV component of the light. If you go to a desert you are hit by the sunlight twice - once as it comes down out of the cloudless sky and once as it bounces up off of the dry ground (Antarctica would actually be worse for this, because snow). So, the dryness of the atmosphere and the lack of vegetation cause a lot of UV. Which is why Arabs wear robes and headgear and cover themselves. And also why the ancient Egyptians invented sunscreen. Not sure if they were the first to do so or not, but they had sunscreen. Good sunscreen.

Tatooine, though, is a desert because the planet itself is lower on water. It probably maintains an atmosphere by having a pretty strong magnetosphere (which Mars lacks - but Tatooine is more a Mars type/K type planet than truly Earthlike. It might well be what Mars would be like if it was just a bit heavier and had a bit more of a magnetic field). Incidentally, this implies fairly heavy seismic activity.

There is nothing in this that says Tatooine is hot.

Luke’s farm could easily be in a temperate region of the planet with reasonable, moderate temperatures. Its implied from the way they dress that it’s on the warm side, but nothing we see says that Tatooine is 100 degrees in the shade - and there ain’t no shade. It could be more in the 70-80 range.

So, we have a decent atmosphere, although I suspect thinner than Earth (Maybe the reason Luke suddenly turns into such a good fighter when he leaves Tatooine is he’s spent his entire life at an atmospheric pressure equivalent to being at 5,000 feet…and Rey is from a similar planet). We have very little water.

We also have, most likely, an ozone layer. Ozone is O3 - it’s oxygen with an extra atom. Water, incidentally, is H2O - you need two oxygen atoms to make one water molecule. The ozone layer blocks some of the UV light from the sun.

What turns oxygen into ozone?

Ultraviolet light.

Which means the more UV coming in from your suns, the more ozone. Which also pulls more oxygen atoms into ozone…possibly instead of water. So, hypothesis:

Tatooine has a thinner atmosphere than Earth but a thicker ozone layer. This helps keep the temperature up to levels where Luke is comfortable outside in thin clothing. It also blocks the UV light that would turn him a nice shade of brown. The balance of UV production from the suns and ozone production in the atmosphere is favorable.

So, Luke and Ben can be pale.

And I just wrote a two screen science note in response to a throwaway fandom line…didn’t I.

Honestly, I’d have gone with space sun screen.

or the fact that ben wasn’t from tatooine and the fact that as a slave in the outer rim, smee skywalker could have very well have not been born on tatooine either, but ended up there through a series of purchases.