Astronomers have found an amazing fifth planet in orbiting the star 55 Cancri. This makes the star the second one apart from the Sun to have five planets in its system.
The 55 Cancri system is located 41 light-years away from Earth in the general direction of the constellation Cancer. The discovery was made by the California and Carnegie Planet Search team, which has been relentlessly searching for extrasolar planets from the last two decades.
UC Berkeley astronomy professor Geoffrey Marcy made the discovery with Paul Butler, now at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. The team started working on this project from 1987.
"This system is interesting because there's a giant planet at 6 AU and four smaller planets inward of 0.8 AU, with a huge remaining gap in between, right where we would expect to find an Earth-sized planet," Marcy said. It looks very much like our own solar system without Earth and Mars.
The study's lead author Debra Fisher said that the new planet very likely has water on its surface. All the planets discovered around 55 Cancri are stable in their circular orbits "We haven't found a twin of our solar system, because the four planets close to the star are all the size of Neptune or bigger," Marcy said.
However he felt that the continued observations over the next few years could in fact reveal the existence of a rocky planet. The new planet takes 260 days to complete its orbit around 55 Cancri and weighs about 45 times of Earth.
