Kepler Spots 'Perfectly Aligned' Alien Worlds

When NASA's Kepler space telescope started finding planets at odd angles to their parent stars, scientists wondered if our solar system's tidy geometry, with the planets neatly orbiting around the sun's equator, was an exception to the rule.

That idea can be laid to rest thanks to an innovative use of the Kepler data which aligned three planets circling the sun-like star Kepler-30 with a giant spot on the star's surface.

The study showed the trio of planets orbiting within one degree, relative to each other and relative to the star's equator. That finding is an indication that Kepler-30, like our own solar system, formed from a rotating disk of gas.

"The planets themselves are not all that remarkable -- two giant Jupiters and one super-Earth -- but what is remarkable is that they aligned so perfectly," astronomer Drake Deming, with the University of Maryland, told Discovery News.

"The dynamics of the system are important for the possible development of life," he added.

The alignment of the Kepler-30 brood is the most precise found yet.

The Kepler telescope is studying about 150,000 sun-like stars for signs of Earth-like planets. Multi-planet systems would have to be somewhat aligned to fall into the telescope's narrow and deep field of view.

Kepler's targets are all hundreds to thousands of light years away. One light-year is about 5.9 trillion miles.

Read more at Discovery News