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NASA Kepler Mission discovers unusually close rocky and gaseous planets around distant solar-type star

News item about the discovery of two new planets circling a Sun-like star. The planets are unusual in that one is a small, rocky planet, the other is large and gaseous, and they are unusually close together.

5 July 2012

University of Birmingham Aston Webb building

Scientists at the University of Birmingham are among an international team of astronomers which has today announced the discovery of an unusual planetary system circling a solar-type star 1,200 light years from Earth. The results, which are published in Science, come from observations made by the NASA Kepler space telescope.