Mauna Kea spots star
system like ours

HILO » Astronomers on Mauna Kea have confirmed the existence of a nearby star system that is the most similar to our solar system ever seen, Gemini Observatory announced.

The clincher was a mass of dust around it.

The star, 300 light years from Earth in the constellation Aries, doesn't have a name. It's known as BD +20 307. Astronomers have known about it since 1983, but never got a clear look at it until a team led by astronomer Inseok Song used both the Gemini and Keck observatories to make detailed observations recently.

What they saw was a whole lot of dust, more than they had ever seen at a similar distance from a similar star. Besides that, BD +20 307 is similar to our sun, and the dust is about the same distance from the star as the Earth is from the sun.

In other words, the whole thing looks a lot like our solar system. That's different from most of the other planets outside our solar system. Their existence is hinted by the effects of their massive gravity.

Those have all been huge balls of gas like the planets Jupiter and Saturn, not relatively small balls of rock like Earth and Mars.

Topping off the similarity of BD +20 307 to our solar system is that the mass of dust is apparently created by asteroid-sized objects smacking into each other, the Gemini announcement said.

The amount of dust around BD +20 307 is about 1 million times more than the amount around the sun.

The findings of Song's team were to be published today in the British science journal Nature.