It is not unusual for astronomers to find other planetary systems besides the solar system, some farther, some closer to ours, but it is for the first time that they’ve managed to observe a system strikingly similar to ours, 5,000 light-years away, which they’ve considered to be a smaller version of the one we know.

The discovery of two planets almost the size of Saturn and Jupiter, orbiting around a start that’s similar to the Sun, only smaller and cooler, open new possibilities to what could be out there. “This is the first time we’ve found a Jupiter-like planet in the same system as a Saturn planet,” said lead author Scott Gaudi, assistant professor at Ohio State University, in a statement issued by the National Science Foundation.

“The fascinating part is that if we ‘scale’ everything to the mass and brightness of the parent star, the masses of these planets relative to their start, and the amount of sunlight they receive, [the planets] are close to our own Jupiter and Saturn,” Gaudi added. “There’s reason now to believe there are probably many more solar systems like it.”

Up until now, astronomers have managed to identify several planetary systems, some of them with an asteroid belt, others with planets similar to Neptune, and even one triple star planetary system, but it is for the first time that they’ve discovered such striking resemblance to the solar system.

Only 7 percent of the known stars close to the Sun have planets gravitating around them, but the systems they form are completely different from what astronomers have just discovered, through using the gravitational microlensing technique, capable of detecting different objects, whether they have little or no light.

Astronomers see the discovery as just a first step in finding what they’ve been looking for so long: other Earths, and the similarities could give nothing but hope that one day, other habitable planets will be found, and why not, maybe other forms of life.