This animation shows the planetary system around the star 55 Cancri, beginning with its outermost planet and zooming in toward the star. With the recent discovery of an inner Neptune-sized planet, 55 Cancri has become the first star outside of our Sun known to support four planets.

The new planet whips around the star every 2.8 days at just a fraction of the distance between the Sun and Earth, or 5.6 million kilometers (3.5 million miles). The others orbit every 14.6, 44 and 4,520 days, respectively. The outermost of these is still the only Jupiter-sized planet known to reside as a far away from its parent star as our own Jupiter.

The star 55 Cancri is about 5 billion years old, a bit lighter in weight than the Sun, and is located 41 light-years away in the constellation Cancer.

Data from the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory in West Texas, the Lick Observatory in Northern California and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope were used to find the new planet using the radial velocity technique.

Image credit: NASA/JPL