** *Newfound Planet Could Support Life As We Know It*
NASA / JPL-Caltech This artist's conception shows four of the five planets that orbit 55 Cancri, a star much like our own. The most recently discovered planet looms large in the foreground. The colors of the planets were chosen to resemble those of our own solar system. Astronomers do not know what the planets actually look like. ------------------------------ Planet-hunters say they have detected a giant world that is nestled among four others in a planetary system 41 light-years from Earth. This newfound world is in the "Goldilocks zone" - a place that's not too hot, not too cold, but just right for the existence of liquid water and conceivably life. The fresh discovery, announced today during a NASA teleconference, focuses on a star and planetary system called 55 Cancri, in the constellation Cancer. The system is already well-known to astronomers who search for the telltale signs of planets beyond our own solar system - but the newly detected planet has taken the search to a new level. "We're announcing the discovery of the first quintuple-planet system," Debra Fischer, an astronomer at San Francisco State University and lead author of a paper due to appear in the Astrophysical Journal, told reporters. Geoff Marcy, a pioneer planet-hunter from the University of California at Berkeley who contributed to the paper, said the planetary system is a "souped-up" version of our own. Like our own solar system, these planets make nearly circular orbits around the parent star - but they're super-sized. The innermost planet is about the size of Neptune and whips around the parent star in less than three days, at a distance of about 3.5 million miles. The farthest-out planet is four times as massive as Jupiter and takes 14 Earth years to orbit, at a distance of about 539 million miles - or just a little farther out than our solar system's Jupiter. NASA / JPL-Caltech This diagram shows the 55 Cancri system at top and our own solar system at bottom. In each view, the "habitable zone" is marked as a green band. ------------------------------ MORE HERE: http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/11/06/451256.aspx
