Bizarre Cosmic Objects: Our Weird Solar System
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The solar system is familiar. It’s home. You’ve probably learned about all the planets in school, memorizing their names and their order of distance from the sun.
The four planets closest to the sun are rocky, with solid surfaces you can walk or land a spacecraft on. Then you have the four outer planets (excluding Pluto), huge spheres of gas surrounded by rings. In between lies the asteroid belt like a cosmic moat.
It’s a tidy configuration, and for about a century and a half, it was all we knew about planets. Then, in 1995, everything changed.
That’s when astronomers discovered the first planet orbiting another star, a Jupiter-like gas giant named 51 Pegasi B. Over the next two decades, astronomers would discover thousands more worlds. According to estimates, as many as hundreds of billions of planets populate the Milky Way galaxy. The solar system, we now know, is far from alone.
The multitude of planetary systems seems to be yet another fact of our cosmic inconsequence, in which our corner of the universe is just like any other. But while planetary systems abound, astronomers are finding that in some respects, the solar system stands out.
“It’s increasingly seeming that the solar system is something of an oddball,” says Gregory Laughlin, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the US.
It’s still too soon to know for sure how odd the solar system is (odd like your quirky uncle, or odd like a leprechaun riding a unicorn?), but scientists are already trying to explain why it might be so. If it turns out to be a cosmological anomaly, then so might be Earth – and life. Maybe, we really are special.
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