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ek slash special offer. This is Scientific American 60 second science I'm

Christopher and Dahlia. 60 seconds. I'm Christopher Intagiata. The more astronomers study the

heavens, the more they realize our solar system is weird. So there are a few

things that make the solar system kind of strange. Lauren Weiss, an astrophysicist at the University of Montreal.

One of which is that we have a giant planet, only about 10% of sun-like stars have a giant planet. There are probably even a fewer that have two giant planets.

In addition to giant Jupiter and lesser giant Saturn, we have tiny Mercury, just a bit bigger

than the Earth's moon.

So if we're weird, what does a typical solar system look like?

Weiss and her team train their telescopes on 355 star systems, known to host a handful of small exoplanets and they found that most of the planets within individual star systems

tended to be similar in size. So if I'm a planet and I'm say two times the size of Earth, my neighbor, the next planet over is also likely to be two times the size of Earth, give or take a little bit.

And they were strung out at similar distances from each other too, like peas in a pod, she says.

Compared to that orderly array, our system looks more like...

Let's see, if I stick with food, I don't know, like a whole Thanksgiving dinner or something.

...