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Tom Kalbfus

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ALIEN World Orbiting Sun's 'Long Lost' Twin? Rare Exoplanet Found in S

Here is the original article:
http://www.designntrend.com/articles/10 … eveals.htm

ALIEN World Orbiting Sun's 'Long Lost' Twin? Rare Exoplanet Found in Star Cluster, New Study Reveals
Jan 16, 2014 02:30 PM EST by Jessica Durham
       
NASA
An alien planet was found orbiting Sun's "long-lost twin." (Photo : Reuters/NASA)
An alien planet was found orbiting the Sun's solar twin.
According to The Register, astronomers used the European Southern Observatory's HARPS planet hunter in Chile and other telescopes around the world found three "alien planets" in the star cluster Messier 67.
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It's very rare to find one of the exoplanets is orbiting a star that is almost identical to the Sun.
HARPS was able to find three of them, two which are around a third of the mass of Jupiter and orbit stars similar to the Sun in seven and five days respectively. The third world is bigger than Jupiter and takes 122 days to get around its host star.
Researchers were excited to find a star that's very similar to our Sun that we know in the same star cluster, and it also has it's own planet. But you can forget about it being similar to Earth; it's too close to its host for any liquid water to exist there.
"These new results show that planets in open star clusters are about as common as they are around isolated stars - but they are not easy to detect," said ESO's Luca Pasquini, co-author of the new paper. "The new results are in contrast to earlier work that failed to find cluster planets, but agrees with some other more recent observations. We are continuing to observe this cluster to find how stars with and without planets differ in mass and chemical makeup."
The Messier 67 star cluster is around 2,500 light-years away in the Cancer constellation and contains around 50 stars. Researchers have been carefully monitoring the star cluster over the last six years to look for any tiny motions that will reveal the presence of plants in the system, which only a handful are found in star clusters.
What do you think of planets orbiting the Sun's "long lost twin?" Sound off below!

2,500 light years away? Looks like this would make an excellent interstellar ark destination, it contains 50 stars and it has planets, I bet some of them are proto Earths that could be terraformed. At half the speed of light, a one way trip would take 5000 years, and upon arrival there would be lots of star systems to explore.