Astronomers have found a pair of Earth-sized planets orbiting a star similar to the sun, though neither is believed to be suitable for life, scientists on NASA’s Kepler telescope team said.
The discovery follows confirmation of a super-Earth sized planet, called Kepler-22b, which circles the right distance from its parent star for liquid water to exist on its surface.
The newly discovered planets, called Kepler-20e and 20f, have at least three gas-giant siblings, one of the larger planetary systems found to date.
But the family is nothing like our solar system, where rocky worlds like Venus, Earth and Mars are grouped together closer in toward the sun while gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn are segregated in the outer regions.
The two Earth-like and three Neptune-sized planets in the Kepler-20 family are interspersed and all orbit closer to the parent star than our solar system’s innermost planet, Mercury.
Kepler-20e and 20f, which are believed to be too hot for liquid water, probably are not habitable, at least not today.
The system is located about 1,000 light-years away in the constellation Lyra.
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