Solar System's 'look-alike' found
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Page last updated at 21:09 GMT, Sunday, 6 April 2008 22:09 UK
Solar System's 'look-alike' found
By Paul Rincon
Science reporter, BBC News, Belfast
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.
And he told a major meeting that astronomers were on the brink of finding many more of them.
The St Andrews researcher said this planetary system, and others like it, could host terrestrial planets like Earth. It was just a matter of time
before such worlds were detected, he explained.
