Farther from the center

What better way to end the millennium than with the discovery announced last week of the first solar system besides our own. For astronomers, the discovery creates all manner of questions related to planets and their motion. The rest of us can take comfort in knowing that the home solar system is not alone in the incomprehensible breadth of the universe.

The discovery of at least three planets circling the star Upsilon Andromedae, some 44 light years from here, completes the removal of Earth from the core of the heavens, an eviction that began about 1,000 years ago when, according to astronomer Richard Panek, the entire universe was thought to consist of what is now called our solar system. It was about 500 years ago that observations by Nicolaus Coperincus knocked the earth out of the center of this solar system and a mere century ago that astronomers found the Milky Way wasn’t the only galaxy around.

Century by century, these discoveries have allowed people to give up the notion of this planet’s importance in the cosmos. Perhaps this once depressed kings with lofty aspirations, but for us commoners it is more like living in Maine, far from the hubbub of New York: a pleasant relief. Rather than living by itself at the still point of the turning worlds, the Earth is aligned with an immensity of space and possibility.

Now the solar system has a long-lost relative — not that anyone has seen it yet. The scientists from San Francisco State University, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado have instead inferred the existence of three Jupiter-like planets from their effect on their home star. And if there are two solar systems in the universe, is it likely that there are far more than two?

Further, if there are at least two solar systems, do they now need names?