There are other worlds besides ours …
… and the latest astronomical studies show this perfectly. The Kepler Space Telescope has found thousands of worlds during its four-year mission and thus proved that our galaxy is literally packed with planets! Many of which can, and by and large - should be inhabited. At the same time, the same studies have shown that the Solar System, for some reason, stands alone and is a kind of anomaly among other systems and galaxies …
This fact is clearly seen in the animation "Kepler's Planetarium IV", created by a graduate student of the Department of Astronomy at the University of Washington, Ethan Kruse. In it, Kruse compares the orbits of hundreds of exoplanets from Kepler's database to our own solar system, which is shown on the right in the animation, and is immediately striking. The animation shows the relative size of the Keplerian planets (although, of course, not on a scale comparable to their stars), as well as the surface temperature.
In the animation, it is very easy to notice how strange the solar system seems compared to other systems. Prior to the Kepler mission in 2009, astronomers assumed that most exoplanetary systems would be arranged like ours: small rocky planets closer to the center, huge gas giants in the middle, and icy chunks of rock on the periphery. But it turned out that everything was arranged much more bizarre.
Kepler has found "hot Jupiters," huge gas giants that practically touch the stars in the system. As Kruse himself explains, “Kepler's device dictates that it is much better at detecting planets with more compact orbits. In smaller systems, planets orbit faster, making it much easier for a telescope to spot them."
Of course, the anomalousness of the solar system against the general background may be due to the fact that our knowledge about other systems is still insufficient, or because, as explained above, we mainly notice smaller systems with a fast periodicity of motion. Nevertheless, Kepler has already found 685 star systems, and none of them are similar to ours.
Let's watch a colorful video of Kepler:
