Seven Planet Solar System Discovered...!!!

The discovery of a seventh planet around a distant star makes it one of the richest planetary systems discovered. The discovery at the Dwarf Star KIC 11442793, which is some 2,500 light years away from earth, recorded by two separate teams of researchers, could be a record, they said.

Using data from the Kepler Space Telescope, which recently stopped working, a team of researchers volunteering for the Planet Hunters website and another European Team discovered the seventh planet which is Fifth Furthest from the star having an orbit of 125 days. Described as "super-Earth", the seventh planet is around 2.8 times the size of earth.

Kepler uses the transit method to discover new planets, which entails looking for the dip in light as an alien world passes in front of its host star. But there is simply too much data for mission scientists to examine every light curve, so they developed computer programmes to search for the signature of a planetary transit.

The lead researcher for the Planet Hunters team, Chris Lintoff, of the University Of Oxford, said,"This is the first seven planet system from Kepler, using a transiting search. We think the identification is secure. With a transiting system, once you get multiple planets, the odds of them being false positives are very small." He also added that all seven planets of that system are packed quite closely together, with all seven planets orbiting their star within the same distance of that between the sun and the earth.

Other stars have also been identified , but as yet not confirmed to house at least seven planets, with the HD 10180 assumed to have seven to nine planets, while GJ 887C also believed to have seven planets.

Commenting on the paper by Planet Hunters team, Andrew Coller Cameron, professor at astronomy at the University of St Andrews, said: "It's intriguing that a system as well studied as KOI-351 can still harbor hidden surprises that can only be winkled out by human eyes."
He added:"This is a perennial problem in transit hunting, of which we are only too acutely aware in our ground based searches. The best transit signal detection algorithms developed to date still come a very poor second to the human visual system when it comes to patters recognition,. Still we have to rely on machines, because of the sheer volume of data produced by enterprises like transit searches."

The two researches are available on www.arvix.org .