Astronomers have discovered a planetary system orbiting a distant star which looks much like our own.
They found two planets that were close matches for Jupiter and Saturn orbiting a star about half the size of our Sun.
Martin Dominik, from St Andrews University in the UK, said the finding suggested systems like our own could be much more common than we thought.
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This is ooooold news: see the 2nd article here ...
What, scienceblogs demands parentheses in HTML tags? No other blog hoster does ... Well, I meant: look here, 2. article!
Yeah, looks like the BBC has been a bit slow on the uptake with this one.
This is not exactly old news. This research was reported initially quite some time ago, most likely in a press release. The BBC report I'm referring to here is actually very current, reporting the presentation of a paper on the ongoing or just recently ended meetings of the Royal Astronomical Society. I'm sure the work has advanced considerably since then, but none of that would be recorded at this level of abbreviated detail.
> I'm sure the work has advanced considerably since then
Why should that be so? The Science paper that made the initial news earlier this year contains essentially all than can be known about this planetary system, since there was only this one microlensing event and there won't be any other data for a long time.