![]() ![]() So our solar system is, in some sense, a bit of a freak and not the most typical kind of system that Nature cooks up." This is quite unlike our own solar system, where there is nothing with an orbit inside that of Mercury. "We are now beginning to understand that nature seems to overwhelmingly prefer systems that have multiple planets with orbits of less than 100 days. "This discovery is in keeping with our emerging view that virtually every star has planets, and that the galaxy must have many such potentially habitable Earth-sized planets," said coauthor Steve Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. ![]() The team presented its findings in a paper that has been accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics. This greatly improves the sensitivity of searches for small planets and suggests that Tau Ceti is not a lone star but has a planetary system. Using new techniques, the team has found a method to detect signals half the size previously thought possible. The international team of astronomers from the United Kingdom, Chile, United States, and Australia, combined more than six-thousand observations from three different instruments and intensively modeled the data. One of the planets lies in the star's habitable zone – the so-called Goldilocks Zone with it's 'just right' temperatures for supporting liquid water – and has a mass around five times that of Earth, making it the smallest planet found to be orbiting in the habitable zone of any Sun-like star. ![]() Its five planets are estimated to have masses between two and six times the mass of the Earth, making it the lowest-mass planetary system yet detected. At a distance of twelve light years from Earth and visible to the naked eye in the evening sky, Tau Ceti is the closest single star that has the same spectral classification as our Sun. ![]()
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