Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle (SSC)

Itsy Bitsy Solar System

This artist's conception compares a hypothetical solar system centered around a tiny "sun" (top) to a known solar system centered around a star, called 55 Cancri, which is about the same size as our sun. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, in combination with other ground-based and orbiting telescopes, discovered the beginnings of such a miniature solar system 500 light-years away in the Chamaeleon constellation.

The tiny system consists of an unusually small "failed" star, or brown dwarf, called Cha 110913-773444, and a surrounding disk of gas and dust that might one day form planets. At a mass of only eight times that of Jupiter, the brown dwarf is actually smaller than several known extrasolar planets. The largest planet in the 55 Cancri system is about four Jupiter masses.

Astronomers speculate that the disk around Cha 110913-773444 might have enough mass to make a small gas giant and a few Earth-sized rocky planets, as depicted here around the little brown dwarf.

In this image the bodies of the two systems have been drawn to the same scale. In each system, the terrestrial planets have been enlarged and the distances between the planets and their parent bodies have been scaled down for easier viewing.

The Spitzer Space Telescope is a NASA mission managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This website is maintained by the Spitzer Science Center, located on the campus of the California Institute of Technology and part of NASA's Infrared Processing and Analysis Center.