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ScienceDaily (July 26, 2012) — Our solar system exhibits a remarkably orderly configuration: The eight planets orbit the sun much like runners on a track, circling in their respective lanes and always keeping within the same sprawling plane. In contrast, most exoplanets discovered in recent years -- particularly the giants known as "hot Jupiters" -- inhabit far more eccentric orbits.

Now researchers at MIT, the University of California at Santa Cruz and other institutions have detected the first exoplanetary system, 10,000 light years away, with regularly aligned orbits similar to those in our solar system. At the center of this faraway system is Kepler-30, a star as bright and massive as the sun. After analyzing data from NASA's Kepler space telescope, the MIT scientists and their colleagues discovered that the star -- much like the sun -- rotates around a vertical axis and its three planets have orbits that are all in the same plane.

"In our solar system, the trajectory of the planets is parallel to the rotation of the sun, which shows they probably formed from a spinning disc," says Roberto Sanchis-Ojeda, a physics graduate student at MIT who led the research effort. "In this system, we show that the same thing happens."

Their findings, published July 25 in the journal Nature, may help explain the origins of certain far-flung systems while shedding light on our own planetary neighborhood.

"It's telling me that the solar system isn't some fluke," says Josh Winn, an associate professor of physics at MIT and a co-author on the paper. "The fact that the sun's rotation is lined up with the planets' orbits, that's probably not some freak coincidence." .........
I find the bolded particularly interesting.