Kepler Space Telescope [credit: NASA]

The two nearest planets to the star Kepler-90 (90b and 90c) are very close to a 5:4 (i.e. first order) orbit ratio.

Nasa finds a distant star circled by eight planets, equal to the complement in our own Solar System, BBC News reports.

It’s the largest number of worlds ever discovered in a planetary system outside our own.

The star known as Kepler-90, is just a bit hotter and larger than the Sun; astronomers already knew of seven planets around it.

The newly discovered world is small enough to be rocky, according to scientists.

“This makes Kepler 90 the first star to host as many planets as our own Solar System,” said Christopher Shallue, a software engineer at Google, which contributed to the discovery.

Engineers from Google used a type of artificial intelligence called machine learning to find planets that were missed by previous searches.

The discovery was based on observations gathered by Nasa’s Kepler Space Telescope.

The new world, dubbed Kepler-90i, appears to be sizzling hot, orbiting its star once every 14.4 days.

Its parent star is very distant, lying 2,545 light-years away.

Some 3,500 exoplanets – worlds circling other stars – have been documented in recent decades.

Source: Star system has record eight exoplanets | BBC News