NASA’s Kepler Spacecraft Discovers Extraordinary New Planetary System

excerpt: Scientists using NASA’s Kepler, a space telescope, recently discovered six planets made of a mix of rock and gases orbiting a single sun-like star, known as Kepler-11, which is located approximately 2,000 light years from Earth.

“The Kepler-11 planetary system is amazing,” said Jack Lissauer, a planetary scientist and a Kepler science team member at NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. “It’s amazingly compact, it’s amazingly flat, there’s an amazingly large number of big planets orbiting close to their star – we didn’t know such systems could even exist.”

In other words, Kepler-11 has the fullest, most compact planetary system yet discovered beyond our own.

Full story here