Scientists have found a solar system 100 light years away from us
The scientists have identified a star resembling the sun with seven different planets which include one that might be the smallest ever found outside the solar system.
The planetary system around HD 10180 which is more than 100 light years far from us could be the richest ever discovered. One of the scientists says that this is part of the proof that the universe is full of planets, and many of them might be like the Earth. Although most of the planets identified are large and have 13 to 25 times the size of our planet, the astronomers have found one that is only 1.4 times the size of Earth. this would be the smallest exoplanet ever found since 15 years ago, when they started searching for planets outside the solar system. Since then about 450 exoplanets have been found. Until now they only found one to three planets per star, and they were usually huge balls of gas similar to Jupiter or Saturn, but this time they found seven, which is almost as many as we have in our solar system which counts eight.
Christophe Lovis of Geneva University, one of the scientists involved in the project says that the first five are about the size of Neptune and are made from rocks and ice and are probably not habitable because they have a layer of gas (hydrogen and helium). The sixth is a planet the same size as Saturn and the seventh, which is also the smallest, is so close to the star that one year measured here would be the equivalent of a day there. Lovis and his team were not able to observe the planets directly because of the light given by their parent star and used the observatory’s 3.6 meter (11.8 foot) telescope at La Silla, Chile, to study the star itself. The research took six years and 190 measurements until they succeeded to eliminate the wobbling effect caused by the gravitational forces of nearby planets.
