Kepler finds a remote solar system

2011/03/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Astronomia

In the latest results published by the Kepler space telescope, it has given data of more than a thousand exoplanet candidates. Some have already been confirmed and six of them orbit around a star, that is, they form a solar system.

The star of the newly discovered solar system, Kepler-11, is 2,000 light-years away. Five of these six planets are closer to their star than our Sun and the sixth at that distance. Therefore, having such high temperatures, they cannot create or take life.

Astronomers have highlighted that all planets are quite large. In fact, the mass of the system is 10 times the mass of the Earth, while in our solar system, within a radius 5 times greater than the earth's orbit, the mass of the system is only twice that of the Earth. "We didn't expect to find such large planets orbiting so close to a single star," said research chief Jack Lissauer, a researcher at NASA's Ames research center.

What's more, according to Lissauer, since the first exoplanet was discovered in 1995, the detection of this solar system is the greatest success. After the analysis of these exoplanets, the researchers hope to draw important conclusions about the formation of the planets.

But Kepler has also detected many other exoplanets. Considering that the dream of many astronomers is to find a system similar to that of the Solar System and, above all, an exoplanet parallel to Earth, they now have where to look.