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Two planets of roughly the same size as Jupiter and Saturn have been discovered orbiting a nearby sun-like star, an international team of astronomers announced.
This is the first time that a planetary system like our own has been spotted. Scientists expect to find an Earth-like planet within the system.
An eleven-nation team led by Scott Gaudi, an astronomer at Ohio State University, reported Thursday that it discovered two planets circling a parent star 5,000 light-years away.
The findings have been published in the Feb. 15 issue of the journal Science. Dr. Lee Cheol-woo of the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, a member institute of the joint team, and Prof. Han Cheong-ho of Chungbuk National University were listed as co-authors.
The two planets, one of which is 71 percent the size of Jupiter and the other 90 percent the size of Saturn, orbit a parent star that is about half the size of our sun.
Although astronomers have spotted around 250 planets circling other stars, this is the first planetary system that resembles our solar system in scale.
Professor Gaudi said it looks like "a scale model of our solar system", based on the size of the planets and their distance from the star. The new findings have boosted the probability that solar systems like ours are common in the galaxy, he added.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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