55 Cancri's fifth planet is perhaps not it's last one - NCCG.ORG Ning Network Archive 2008-10

Our solar system is by far the largest of about 130 planetary systems that exist. There are stars other than the sun such as 55 Cancri and mu Ara around which planets have been found to orbit. The 55 Cancri is about 41 light-years away from solar system, in the constellation of cancer.

A new fifth planet has been found to be revolving around the 55 Cancri star making it the only quintuple planetary system other than our own solar system. However, the 55 Cancri is much older and dimmer, than the sun, with only 58% of the sun’s luminosity. Researchers contemplate that the new planet should be 45 times the mass of earth and around half the size of Saturn. The discovery has been made and announced by a team from UC Berkeley and Carnegie planet search team. UC Berkeley astronomy professor Geoffrey Marcy said

This system is interesting because there’s a giant planet at 6 AU and four smaller planets inward of 0.8 AU, with a huge remaining gap in between, right where we would expect to find an Earth-sized planet,”

Debra Fischer, an astronomy professor at the San Francisco State University states that since the fifth planet is within the habitable zone of the star, water could be present if not on the planet, on a moon within the zone. The astronomers’ expedition of the 55 Cancri doesn’t end there.

Seemingly, they are focusing on a zone between 260-day orbit of the new planet and the 14-year orbit of another gaseous mass. Any possibility of a planet being present in this zone should be around the size of Neptune or smaller, only in that case can the planetary orbits be so stable.

Discovery of a new planet is based on stellar wobbles. Wobbles are caused due to Doppler’s effect wherein, frequency of a signal changes when the source of the signal moves either away from or toward us.

This is probably not the last planet to this star and more such extra solar planets are yet to be discovered. 55 Cancri has produced “a rat’s nest of radial velocity data,” Fischer said.

“We probably still don’t have all the planets. We are pulling out one thread at a time, disentangling all these orbits, and it has taken a lot more data and time than we predicted. I think it’s amazing what we have been able to do with the system.”

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