Beyond solar system, planets that look familiar
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The universe looked a little more familiar and friendlier on Tuesday. The roll call of planets beyond the solar system swelled significantly with the announcement of a trio of newly discovered worlds much
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In a solar system thousands of light years away, a star about half the size of our sun is being orbited by two planets that seem like smaller versions of Jupiter and Saturn, astronomers report
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Astronomers have discovered a new class of planets that take less than a day to whiz round their parent stars.
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Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have photographed one of the smallest objects ever seen around a normal star beyond our Sun. Weighing in at 12 times the mass of Jupiter, the object is small enough to be a planet.
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Astronomers have discovered a new class of planets outside the solar system that hug their parent stars so tightly they take less than a day to complete an orbit.
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A new extra-solar planet has been identified orbiting a star 500 light years from our solar system. The discovery was made by a team using a four-inch diameter telescope to make their observations - a size
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Astronomers have found a miniature version of our own solar system 5,000 light years across the galaxy â the first planetary system that really looks like our own.
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Gas giants that orbit close to their stars likely migrated inward, shaking up debris that could coalesce into Earthlike worlds, new computer models predict.
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British researchers detect water in atmosphere of planet that circles star far beyond our solar system.
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New images obtained by a sharp-eyed Martian satellite reveal that some Red Planet features once thought to have been carved by flowing water were in fact created by other processes.
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Rocky planets with conditions suitable for life may be more common than previously thought, a study finds
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A team of astronomers announced last week the discovery of some of the smallest planets yet detected beyond our solar system. The two newly discovered planets represent a new class of extrasolar planets, and
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While striving to find ever smaller, more rocky worlds, planet hunters have moved from discovering not just Jupiter-class planets outside our solar system. Now astronomers have found two new Neptune-class planets on their road to pinpointing a new Earth-like system.
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A group of European-led    astronomers has made a photograph of what appears to be a planet orbiting another    star. If so, it would be the first confirmed picture of a world beyond our solar    system.
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Most of the extrasolar planets discovered to date are gas giants like Jupiter, but their orbits are either much closer to their parent stars or are highly eccentric. Planet hunters are on the verge of confirming the discovery of Jupiter-size planets with Jupiter-like orbits. Solar systems that contain these "good" Jupiters may harbor habitable Earth-like planets as well.
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A nearby star thought to harbor comets and asteroids now appears to be home to planets, too. The presumed worlds are smaller than Jupiter and could be as tiny as Pluto, new observations suggest.
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The 130 extrasolar planets discovered so far are in solar systems very different from our own, in which life-bearing planets like Earth are unlikely to exist. But an obscure characteristic of these planets and their stars has led astronomers to predict that our galaxy is brimming with solar systems like ours. The key to their prediction is something called metallicity.