An embarrassment of planets

摘要

A system predicted to contain as many as seven planets orbiting a Sun-like star has been discovered 39 parsecs from the Sun - the most populous extrasolar planetary system found so far. The planets orbit HD 10180 near the southern constellation Hydrus. Christophe Lovis at the University of Geneva in Switzerland and his team used a spectrograph at the European Southern Observatory in Chile to look for a characteristic stellar 'wobble' caused by planets tugging on their parent star.