Solar System Like Ours Found

February 11th, 2008

Two planetary discoveries have scientists believing that solar systems like ours are going to become much more common. The two planets have great similarities to Our Jupiter and Saturn. The newfound worlds both appear to be gaseous and are about 80 percent the sizes of Jupiter and Saturn, the astronomers said today. They orbit a star that is about half the size of our sun and is dimmer and much cooler.

“This is the first discovery of a multi-planet system that could be analogous to our solar system,” said research team member Alison Crocker, a Dartmouth College graduate now studying at Oxford University.

This newfound solar system is approximately 5,000 light years away and will require a miracle anti-aging process to ever see us get that far. The larger planet’s orbit is 2.3 times as far from its host star as the Earth is from the sun. Jupiter is 5.2 times farther from the sun than Earth.

Though those are slight differences, astronomers have found some eerie similarities between that system and our own.

* The ratio between the masses of the two worlds is about 3:1, similar to the Jupiter/Saturn ratio.

* The smaller planet is about twice as far from its star as the larger one, just as Saturn is roughly twice as far away from the sun as Jupiter.

* The two worlds orbit their star in 5 and 14 years, similar to the 2:5 orbit ratio of Jupiter and Saturn.

The planets were found using a technique called gravitational lensing, in which light from the faraway planets is bent and magnified by the gravity of a foreground object, in this case a another star. The technique has been used to find three other Jupiter-mass planets, each around different stars, in the past.

“This is the first time we had a high-enough magnification event where we had significant sensitivity to a second planet — and we found one,” said Scott Gaudi, assistant professor of astronomy at Ohio State University. “You could call it luck, but I think it might just mean that these systems are common throughout our galaxy.”

There are many formation theories on this discovery at Space.com as well as discussion about the possibility of other worlds.

Anytime they find anything relatively similar to our own section of the universe it brings up thoughts of possible life of course. We are looking at many places in our own solar system to find just a trace of maybe a bacteria that will show us we have at least some other life out there. That is why space and astronomy are such a fascinating subject to me.