Scientists Find Solar System Like Ours

The new discovery was made by a different technique that favors planets more distant from their star. It is based on a trick of Einsteinian gravity called microlensing. If, in the ceaseless shifting of the stars, two stars should become perfectly aligned with the Earth, the gravity of the nearer star can bend and magnify the light from the more distant one, causing it to suddenly get much brighter for a few days.

If the alignment is especially perfect, any big planets attending the nearer star will get into the act, adding their own little bumps to the more distant starlight.

That is exactly what started happening on March 28, 2006, when a star 5,000 light years away in the constellation Scorpius began to pass in front of one 21,000 light years more distant, causing it to flash. It was picked up by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, or Ogle, a worldwide collaboration of observers who keep watch for such events.

Ogle in turn immediately issued a worldwide call for continuous observations of what is now officially known as OGLE-2006-BLG-109L. The next 10 days, as Andrew Gould of Ohio State said, were “extremely frenetic.”

Among those who provided crucial data and appeared as lead authors of the paper in Science were a pair of amateur astronomers from Auckland, New Zealand, Jennie McCormick and Grant Christie, both members of a group called the Microlensing Follow-Up Network, or MicroFUN. Ms. McCormick, who described herself as “an ordinary New Zealand mother,” said she had done her observing with a 10-inch Meade telescope from a shed in her back yard.