14 DAY TRIAL // Some 200 light-years from us, in the constellation Cetus, lies a star by the name of HIP 11915. It is about the same size as our Sun and even appears to have the same chemical profile and to have formed around the same time, i.e. 4.6 billion years back.
Although perfectly average at first glance, HIP 11915 is now of great interest to astronomers. This is because it appears to be the parent of Jupiter's cosmic twin.
It turns out Jupiter is not one of a kind
Jupiter, the fifth planet from the Sun, is the largest orb in our Solar System. A gas giant, its mass is said to be about one-thousandth that of our parent star. As for its size, studies have shown it to have a radius of 69,911 kilometers (43,440 miles).
The planet has a 12-year orbit and circles the Sun at an average distance of 778.5 million kilometers (nearly 484 million miles), astronomers say.
What's interesting is that, as impressive as it might seem, Jupiter is not one of a kind. On the contrary, data delivered by planet-hunting instruments at the La Silla Observatory in Chile indicates that a similar orb circles nearby star HIP 11915.
The recently documented planet, described in a paper in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, has the same mass and even circles its parent star at a distance comparable to that between Jupiter and the Sun.
“The team has now uncovered a planet with a very similar mass to Jupiter, orbiting a Sun-like star, HIP 11915, at almost exactly the same distance as Jupiter,” say European Southern Observatory researchers.
What do we care if Jupiter has a lost twin?
Having found this twin of Jupiter orbiting HIP 11915, the astronomers behind this research project cannot help but wonder whether other solar systems not all that different to our own could possibly populate the cosmos too, just waiting to be discovered.
If this is the case, this means there might also be other planets nearly identical to our own out there. Hence, it could very well be that there are also alien lifeforms. “Finding a Jupiter twin is an important milestone on the road to finding a planetary system that mirrors our own,” astronomers explain.
