A Crowded Planetary System

An extraordinarily crowded planetary system is providing critical clues for understanding why most known planetary systems appear different from our own solar system. Using data from NASA's Kepler space mission, scientists are investigating the properties of KOI-500, a planetary system that crams five planets into a region less than one twelfth the size of the Earth's orbit. Dr. Darin Ragozzine, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Florida, presented recent findings about this system this Tuesday at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences in Reno, NV.

KOI-500 is an especially compact planetary system, hosting five planets whose "years" are only 1.0, 3.1, 4.6, 7.1, and 9.5 days. "All five planets zip around their star within a region 150 times smaller in area than the Earth's orbit, despite containing more material than several Earths (the planets range from 1.3 to 2.6 times the size of the Earth). At this rate, you could easily pack in 10 more planets, and they would still all fit comfortably inside the Earth's orbit," Ragozzine notes. KOI-500 is approximately 1,100 light-years away in the constellation Lyra, the harp.