Astronomers discover scaled-down Jupiter and Saturn in a faraway solar system like our own

An international team of astronomers has discovered two planets that resemble smaller versions of Jupiter and Saturn in a solar system nearly 5,000 light years away. Scott Gaudi (left), assistant... Click here for more information.

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- An international team of astronomers has discovered two planets that resemble smaller versions of Jupiter and Saturn in a solar system nearly 5,000 light years away.

The find suggests that our galaxy hosts many planetary systems like our own, said Scott Gaudi, assistant professor of astronomy at Ohio State University.

He and his colleagues reported their results in the February 15 issue of the journal Science.

The two planets were revealed when the star they orbit crossed in front of a more distant star as seen from Earth. For a two-week period from late March through early April of 2006, the nearer star magnified the light shining from the farther star.

The phenomenon is called gravitational microlensing, and this was a particularly dramatic example: the light from the more distant star was magnified 500 times.

The Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) first detected the event, dubbed OGLE-2006-BLG-109, on March 28, 2006. The Microlensing Follow Up Network (MicroFUN), led by Andrew Gould, professor of astronomy at Ohio State, then joined with OGLE to organize astronomers worldwide to gather observations of it. Andrzej Udalski, professor of astronomy at Warsaw University Observatory, is the leader of OGLE.

This artist's rendering of a distant solar system shows two newly discovered planets -- one resembling Jupiter (middle) and one resembling Saturn (middle right). Both planets orbit a star that... Click here for more information.

Gaudi took the lead in analyzing the data as they came in. As he studied the light signal, he saw a distortion that he thought was caused by a Saturn-mass planet. Then, less than a day later, came an additional distortion he wasn't expecting: a "blip" in the signal that appeared to be caused by a second, larger planet orbiting the same star.