Orbiting these two stars, Earth’s year would be longer than 365 days, he said, but not by much: “One star in the [Kepler] binary system has a mass 20 percent of the mass of the sun, and the other is 70 percent the mass of the sun. Together their masses only differ from our sun by 10 percent. This would make the year on Earth slightly longer, because the gravity of the stars pulling us inward would be lower, so there’s less centrifugal force and we would orbit around slower,” Boss said.

The length of a day on our planet wouldn’t necessarily change, as long as our moon had still formed and its orbit stayed the same, he said.