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 least 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.
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