On Nov. 6 astronomers announced that the star 55 Cancri, right around the corner at 41 light-years away, has at least five planets in its retinue. Number Five is a Saturn-class world that outweighs Earth by about 45 times. It circles 55 Cancri in a 260-day-long orbit roughly the size of Venus's. Because the star is slightly fainter than our Sun, this new find (officially designated 55 Cancri f) lies within the star's "habitable zone" — at temperatures where water would exist in liquid form. A team led by Debra Fischer (San Francisco State University) and Geoff Marcy (University of California, Berkeley) utilized measurements of the star's very slight cyclical motion toward and away from Earth to infer the planets' presence. It's taken 320 of these measurements at Lick Observatory in California over 18 years to disentangle the contributions of all five planets. . . . . "Finding five extrasolar planets orbiting a star is only one small step," observes Marcy. "Earth-like planets are the next destination." . . . Continued

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