New planet found outside our solar system

Washington: NASA scientists said they discovered a fifth planet orbiting a star outside our own solar system and say the discovery suggests there are many solar systems that are, just like our own, packed with planets.

The new planet is much bigger than Earth, but is a similar distance away from its sun, a star known as 55 Cancri, the astronomers said on Tuesday.

Four planets had already been seen around the star, but the discovery marks the first time as many as five planets have been found orbiting a solar system outside our own with its eight planets, said Debra Fischer, an astronomer at San Francisco State University.

Life could conceivably exist on the surface of a moon that might be orbiting the new planet, but such a moon would be far too small to detect using current methods, the astronomers said.

"The star is very much like our own sun. It has about the same mass and is about the same age as our sun," Fischer told reporters.

It took the researchers 18 years of careful, painstaking study to find the five planets, which they found by measuring tiny wobbles in the star's orbit. The first planet discovered took 14 years to make one orbit.

They said 55 Cancri is 41 light-years away in the constellation Cancer, a light-year being the distance light travels in one year -- about 5.8 trillion miles.

"It would be a little bit warmer than the Earth but not very much," said Jonathan Lunine, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona.