Discussion: Similar Solar System Discovered

[Fraser]

SUMMARY: A team of international astronomers have discovered a planet which is remarkably similar to Jupiter. This new planet circles a star called HD70642 (in the constellation of Puppis) 90 light-years from Earth. It's twice the mass of Jupiter and its orbit is nearly circular around HD70642 at a distance similar to Jupiter's from our own Sun. Furthermore, there don't seem to be any larger planets closer to the star. This planetary discovery is the most similar to our own solar system found so far.


What do you think about this story? Post your comments below.

[DippyHippy]

I'd be interested to see if there are any other gas giants of similar size and in similar orbits to those of Saturn, Uranus and Neptune...

Dips

[Fraser]

Planet hunters are only just now finding planets at the Jupiter scale, so I don't know of anyone spotting anything smaller so far. What makes this discovery so important is that all the planets discovered so far have been extremely large, on elliptical orbits, or really close to their parent star.

[DippyHippy]

There have been a few planets of comparable mass to Saturn, but not within Saturn-like orbits (that I'm aware of)

Dips

[kashi]

This French site has the most up-to-date list of extrasolar planets that I know of on the internet. http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/planets/ I used to run my own extrasolar planets site when I was at school as a bit of a hobby, and I got a lot of my information from here. I gave up on my own site when my workload increased and also because I simply couldn't keep up with all the new discoveries.

Here are two more highly recommended extrasolar planetary resources:

- http://www.jtwinc.com/Extrasolar/ (a speculative site with some nice art work)
- http://www.astronautica.com/owds.html

Hope you can find the answer to your question here.

Kashi

[decordi]

I heard some talk about two new planets which where discorverd after pluto. That one of this planets was found to be able to support life. Please, I would like to know how true this is.