Astronomers have discovered a solar system identical to ours
At about five thousand light years from Earth, is the nearest solar system identical to ours announces Martin Dominik, a researcher at the University of St Andrews.
Until now, astronomers have detected two planets similar to Jupiter and Saturn, both orbiting a star about half the size of our Sun.The scientists believe that this is just beginning and that there is a possibility that we will found planets that are able to sustain life.
“It looks like this may have formed in a similar way to our Solar System. And if this is the case, it looks like our Solar System cannot be unique in the Universe. There should be other similar systems out there which could host terrestrial planets” “emphasizes scientist Martin Dominik .
The new system, named OGLE-2006-BLG-109l, is at about 5000 light years from Earth, and he has more than one planet,which is rare, only 10% of systems discovered so far are known to host more than one planet.
“It’s a kind of scaled-down version of our Solar System. The star the planets are orbiting is half as massive as the Sun and they orbit half as distant to their host star as Jupiter and Saturn orbit around the Sun,” said Dr Dominik.
Solar activity
The goal of astronomers is to find habitable Earth-like planets. “I think it will happen quite soon… Micro-lensing can already go below Earth mass and it has detected more massive planets in the habitable zone. So in the next few years, we will see something really exciting”, said Dr. Martin Dominik.
Martin Dominik is a researcher at University of St Andrews, School of Physics & Astronomy and he is an expert in: theory of photometric and astrometric microlensing, modelling of anomalous microlensing events, numerical routines for solving the lens equation, strategies for planet detection by microlensing and real-time visualization of microlensing light curves.
Dr. Martin Dominik
2 Responses to “Astronomers have discovered a solar system identical to ours”
Very interesting article.I wait to read more about this subject
interesting post