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This is scientific American 60 second science, I’m Christopher Intagliata.

The more astronomers study the heavens, the more they realize: our solar system is weird.

“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 we have a giant planet Only about 10 percent of sunlike stars have a giant planet there are probably even fewer that have two giant planets.”

In addition to giant Jupiter and lesser giant Saturn, we have tiny Mercury just a bit bigger than Earth’s moon.

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

Weiss and her team trained 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,

Uh let’s see, if I stick with food I don’t know like a whole Thanksgiving dinner or something?

The results are in The Astronomical Journal.

As for hunting for habitable worlds:

If we’re trying to find an Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone”

Not too close to the star but not too far away either

And we find an Earth-sized planet closer in, it might be worthwhile to continue searching for planets around that star.

Because there might just be a few more peas in the pod.

Thanks for listening, for scientific American 60 second science, I’m Christopher Intagliata.