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Scientists announced on Tuesday a star with a brood of planets that is a "cousin" to our own solar system."We now know that our sun and its family of planets is not unusual," study team member Geoffrey Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley told reporters in a teleconference.Known as 55 Cancri, the sun-like star contains a family of five planets-the most ever discovered around a distant star. Four of the planets had been previously detected.55 Cancri is located 41 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Cancer. The system contains a clutch of four inner planets and an outer planet."We haven't found a twin of our solar system, because the four planets close to the star are all the size of Neptune or bigger," Marcy said.The inner and outer planets are separated by a huge gap where Earth would be in our solar system.The researchers calculate that the fifth outer planet lies within the star's habitable zone, within which water can exist in its liquid state. Though the planet is a giant ball of gas, liquid water could exist on the surface of a moon or on other, still undiscovered rocky planets in the system. Marcy said he's optimistic that continued observations will reveal a rocky planet around the star within five years.Michael Briley, an astronomer at the National Science Foundation who was not involved in the study, said the discovery marks an "exciting step" in the search for worlds like our own."To go from the first detections of planets around sun-like stars to finding a full-fledged solar system with a planet in a habitable zone in just 12 years is an amazing accomplishment and a testament to the years of hard work put in by these investigators," Briley said.The planets were found using the Lick Observatory and the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii using the so-called radial velocity, or "wobble," technique, whereby the presence of planets are inferred by the way they gravitationally affect their parent star's orbit. They will be detailed in an upcoming issue of Astrophysical Journal.As in the days of Noah...
