Artist recreation of the recently discovered extrasolar planetary system. Original image from ESO.
Five planets have been confirmed to orbit HD 10180, a star very similar to our Sun located 127 million light-years from us, within the Hydrus constellation. There is also the possibilty that two more planets orbit the star and, if that's the case, the HD 10180 system will be almost as big as ours, given that our cosmic neighborhood consists of eight planets (Pluto is no longer one, remember?).
Yet, seemingly so close to our solar system, there are major differences to take into account. The five confirmed planets are as big as Neptune and their orbits span from six to 600 Earth days.
One of the unconfirmed planets may be the size of Saturn and would orbit HD 10180 in 2200 Earth days. The other one may be 1,4 times the size of our planet, but it's yet quite far from habitable (at least by us) as it would be so close to its star that its "year" lasts only 1,18 Earth days. Besides that, this "evil twin" of the Earth is the smallest planet discoverd so far.
The discovery of this rich extrasolar planetary system took about six years and was performed using the world's most powerful spectrograph, an instrument that captures and analyzes light signatures, at ESO's telescope at La Silla, Chile.
The first extrasolar planet was discovered in 1995 around 51 Pegasi and was called 51 Pegasi b, being abbreviated as 51 Peg b and nicknamed Bellerophon. As of September 8th, 2010, there have been announced 490 confirmed detections of such celestial bodies.
More information on the HD 10180 system can be found here. As well, an official video from ESO about the program can be seen below.
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