The test was designed to simulate the type of impact that would have been frequent during Earth's early history, some four billion years ago, when rocky, icy debris in our Solar System accumulated to form planets.
The Kepler mission has identified 132 planets beyond our solar system since its launch in 2009, leading scientists to believe that most stars in our galaxy have planets circling them.
So there are eight planets in the solar system, not nine and not 10.
So far, telescopes have been able to detect just over 300 planets outside our Solar System.
But these are the first images of planets outside the Solar System, or exoplanets as they are called.
Probes have shown us stunning images of the rings of Saturn and the outer planets of our solar system.
CNN: Bush: 'It is time for America to take the next steps' in space
Spitzer was launched in 2003 and has proven to be an invaluable source of data about planets outside the solar system.
That is how the planets of our solar system most likely formed.
Without a new nomenclature, these discoveries raised the prospect that textbooks could soon be talking about 50 or more planets in the Solar System.
BBC: NEWS | Science/Nature | Astronomers name 'world of chaos'
While putting money into renewed human space flight efforts, the proposal cuts scientific research, particularly the study of the other planets in our solar system.
Kepler meanwhile will just keep counting planets beyond our Solar System.
BBC: Kepler telescope spies 'most Earth-like' worlds to date
In turn, that should help resolve questions about how the Moon, the Earth, and other planets in the solar system evolved in the first place.
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And the hole's outer edge is roughly where rocky planets, like the inner planets of this solar system (including the earth), are expected to be.
Like phone books, we used to have immutable facts all compiled in Encyclopedia Britannica: 9 planets in our solar system, the Soviet Union, and avoid alcohol.
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If one body is much larger than its neighbours, such as the sun compared with the planets of the solar system, its effect dominates the others.
I'm a science journalist and author of "Distant Wanderers: the Search for Planets Beyond the Solar System" who writes about over-the-horizon technology, primarily astronomy and space science.
"It means we're really in the arena where it's possible to detect all the planets of our Solar System, but around other stars, " he told BBC News.
BBC: Exoplanet Kepler 37b is tiniest yet - smaller than Mercury
The discovery of more than 330 planets outside our solar system in recent years has helped refine the number of life forms that are likely to exist.
I'm a science journalist and author of "Distant Wanderers: the Search for Planets Beyond the Solar System" who writes about over-the-horizon technology, primarily in the realms of astronomy and space science.
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Finding five planets in a solar system other than the Earth's represents a record, and is all the more impressive because many astronomers thought it would not be possible to disentangle so many signals.
The main source of meteorites, Chinese folklore notwithstanding, is the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, a rough-and-tumble region of our solar system in which would-be planets are upset by Jovian gravity.
Without it such a galaxy's outer parts would spin more slowly than the inner ones (just as the outer planets of the solar system move around the sun more slowly than the earth does).
The decreased allocation of funds to NASA programs was reported in the press as early as Feb. 13, lowering available funds for planetary science programs that support Mars exploration and missions to outer planets in the Solar System.
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Since the very first planets outside our solar system were discovered in the early 1990s, the hope has been to find an "Earth twin" - a planet like ours, orbiting a star like ours, at a distance like ours.
In 1609, Italian philosopher and physicist Galileo Galilei used descriptions of Lippershey's gadget to build his own telescope, and with it he was able to observe the Earth, the Moon and several planets in our solar system in detail for the first time.
And because Gaia will track anything that passes across its e2v CCDs, it is likely also to see countless objects that have hitherto gone unrecorded - such as asteroids, planets beyond our Solar System, and tepid stars that never quite fired into life.
It's taken more than six years of development, but a new imaging system for the Palomar Observatory's 200-inch Hale Telescope finally started capturing images last month, and promises to aid significantly in the search for planets outside our solar system (otherwise known as exoplanets).
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And water would be all the more exciting on Ganymede because it is the largest moon in the solar system (larger even than the planets Mercury and Pluto) and, like earth, it has a permanent magnetic field that protects part of its surface from bombardment by certain sorts of life-destroying radiation.
The "new" Solar System agreed at the IAU's General Assembly has eight planets - Mercury to Neptune - and at least three dwarf planets: Pluto, Eris and the largest asteroid in the Solar System, Ceres.
BBC: NEWS | Science/Nature | Astronomers name 'world of chaos'
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