SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- More than two decades of research has resulted in a major find for astronomy -- a star with a record number of planets, and according to experts, it's just the beginning.
Here on Earth, scientists are always asking the question, are we alone?
"The chance of our planet being the only one seems vanishingly small," John Brewer, an astronomy graduate student at San Francisco State University in California, told Ivanhoe.
In the constellation of cancer, astronomer Debra Fisher and her students discovered that a star called 55 Cancri has something no other star outside of our solar system has -- five planets orbiting it. That's a record!
"Just finding a system that is so full of planets tells us that planet formation is easy," Debra Fischer, astronomer at San Francisco State University, told Ivanhoe.
For students, sharing in a discovery puts stars in their eyes.
"Although you can learn from books, the cutting edge research that's being done now, the new research isn't in the books," Brewer explained. "It's with the research scientists that are performing the studies."
According to Fischer, this fifth planet is special because it orbits at what's called the "goldilocks" distance, where the temperature isn't too hot or too cold to support liquid water, a key characteristic for life.
"The theorists are predicting that there are still other planets around 55 Cancri," Fischer said, "so we're going to keep looking for them there."
This is a quest 41 light years from Earth.
One planet can take 14 years to orbit around a star, so discovering planet number six may take a while, but these students will soon be the researches that keep looking.
FIVE ROCKS AROUND A DIFFERENT SUN: 55 Cancri is the first solar system other than our own known to contain more than four orbiting planets. In fact, only a handful of other stars have been shown to have more than one planet. Astronomers estimate that the number of stars in the universe is written as one followed by 21 zeros. There are probably countless additional solar systems populated with several planets each, but finding them isn't easy because the stars are so far away from Earth. Astronomers have been searching seriously for over 20 years to find extra solar planets.
CONSTELLATIONS: 55 Cancri is a star within the constellation known as Cancer, which is the Latin word for crab. Like many constellations, its interpretation has differed between groups of people and throughout time. Some people have called it a beetle, crayfish, or lobster. It is one of the thirteen constellations grouped together as the Zodiac. In 1929 the International Astronomical Union developed boundaries for all constellations (they chose 88 official constellations) and permit each star to be a part of only one constellation.
The American Astronomical Society and the American Geophysical Union contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.
If you would like more information, please contact:
Debra Fischer
San Francisco State University
Department of Physics and Astronomy
(415) 338-1697
debra.fischer@gmail.com
Steve Maran
American Astronomical Society
Washington, DC 20009-1231
(202) 328-2010
http://www.aas.org
steve.maran@aas.org
Peter Weiss
American Geophysical Union
Washington, DC 20009-1277
(800) 966-2481
http://www.agu.org
pweiss@agu.org
