They say there is no place like home, but it is beginning to look as if there is a place sort of like home 41 light-years from here in the constellation Cancer. Astronomers reported Tuesday that there were at least five planets circling a star there known as 55 Cancri, where only four had been known before, making it the most extensive planetary system yet found outside our own. It is also the one that most resembles our solar system, with a giant planet orbiting far out from the star and four smaller ones circling closer in. The new addition to the system circles 55 Cancri at roughly the distance of Venus in our own solar system, in the so-called habitable zone where it is warm enough for liquid water. But, with 45 times the mass of Earth, the planet is more apt to resemble Neptune or Saturn than Earth, and thus would be a deadly environment for any kind of life that we know. “It’s a system that appears to be packed with planets,” Prof. Debra Fischer of San Francisco State University ...
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