Astronomers searching for worlds around distant stars announced the discovery Thursday of the first Earthlike solar system, boosting hopes that there are other habitable spots in the universe.

“One of the big questions in science is, ‘Are we alone?”‘ said Anne Kinney, who directs the astronomy and physics division at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration headquarters. This “brings us one step closer to answering that.”

While scientists did not find an Earth, they found a close cousin: a Jupiter. It is the first planet scientists have found with a roughly circular orbit that is a healthy distance from its star, like many of Earth’s neighbors.

“It’s got the smell of our own solar system,” said Geoff Marcy, the University of California-Berkeley astronomer who leads the planet-hunting team. “In a sense this solar system is a missing link.”

Since the first extrasolar planet was discovered seven years ago, 91 have been discovered. But many have been so odd many times the size of Jupiter, so close to their suns they’d be permanently scorched or on wild, elliptical orbits scientists began to wonder if our home solar system was unique. It looks like it is not.

The planet, a gas giant known as “55 Cnc d,” circles around the star 55 Cancri located about 41 light years from Earth. The middle-aged star is about the same size as our sun and is visible to the naked eye.

The new planet is about four times the size of Jupiter and is about the same distance from its sun as Jupiter is from ours. While that planet looks comfortingly familiar, the solar system also contains some strange elements: two other large planets hundreds of times larger than Earth that circle close to the sun.

Those oddities carry the “wacky stink of some of the strange solar systems we’ve been finding over the past few years,” Marcy said. They underscore that while Earth’s orderly solar system is no longer unique, neither is it the norm.

Marcy and Paul Butler, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, have spent 17 years perfecting the process of planet hunting and waited nearly a decade before finding their first planet. Now, their system works so smoothly, “we’re actually drowning in planets,” Marcy said. Last week, the team had planned to announce 13 new planets at their news conference. They found two more over the weekend.

Given the length of time they have been monitoring some stars, they expect to find more and more “normal” planets in these distant regions from their suns that have never been probed. “We’re entering virgin territory,” Butler said.

The team plans to census the 2,000 stars within 150 light years from Earth in an attempt to see how common our solar system is. “Are we one in a hundred? One in a thousand? We have no idea right now,” Butler said.