HD 10180: Richest Planetary System Discovered

Astronomers using ESO instruments have discovered a remarkable extrasolar planetary system that has some striking similarities to our own Solar System. At least five planets are orbiting the Sun-like star HD 10180, and the regular pattern of their orbits is similar to that observed for our neighbouring planets. One of the new extrasolar worlds could be only 1.4 times the mass of the Earth, making it the least massive exoplanet ever found.

This video podcast explains how these faraway planets were detected and exactly what we know about them.


Do other rich planetary systems exist? Our Solar System has the most planets of any known star, most probably because it is so hard to detect planets around other stars. Sensitive measurements, though, have now uncovered a slight but complex wobble of the Sun-like star HD 10180 indicating that it has at leave five planets and possibly more, making it the richest extra-solar planetary system yet known. HD 10180's planets were discovered in years of data using the sensitive HARPS spectrograph attached to the ESO's 3.6-meter telescope in La Silla, Chile. The planetary system appears quite different than our Solar System, since all of HD 10180's discovered planets have Neptune-like masses but orbit inside the distance of Mars. An artist's depiction of flying into this system is shown in the above video. In the future, more sensitive data taken over longer time periods may extend the star-wobble detection technique into the realm of uncovering more distant and more Earth-like planets.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Richest
• Planetary
• System
• Sun-like
• star
• HD
• 10180
• ESO

[jorge68746]

I would like to go there .............

[Alexiablack101]

@jorge68746 theve discoverd a new and confirmed super earth named kepler 22b :)

[gurra1351]

Very interesting!

[geozaf]

wt! how do i end up here?! anyway, like in a thousand years before man can do speed of light... even so... how can you withstand the amount of gforce and some debris in space?