“Astronomers scanning the skies for far-flung planets have found that the area surrounding a nearby star is very familiar. A report published in the current issue of the Astrophysical Journal suggests that Vega, located 25 light-years away from our sun, may have an orbiting planetary system that is more similar to our own than is any other yet discovered.

Mark Wyatt of Edinburgh’s Royal Observatory designed a computer model based on observations of a faint disk orbiting Vega, which is three times bigger than the sun and is part of the constellation Lyra, the Harp. Images taken in 1998 by the world’s most sensitive submillimeter camera, known as SCUBA, showed extremely cold dust orbiting the star. ‘The irregular shape of the disk is the clue that it is likely to contain planets,’ Wyatt says. ‘Although we can’t directly observe the planets, they have created clumps in the disk of dust around the star.’ The calculations indicate that the formation of a planet similar in size to Neptune–and orbiting the star at a distance comparable to that between Neptune and the sun–can best explain the observed structure of the disk.”