Wandering Worlds

Saving newborn planets from a fiery demise is just one step in the quest to understand the mysterious planetary systems around other stars.

Before 1995, it was widely assumed that other planetary systems would be like ours. Small rocky planets like Venus and Earth would live near their sun. Large gaseous planets like Jupiter and Saturn would live farther out. And all of them would have nearly circular orbits. Never mind the fact that, at that time, there was no observational evidence for the existence of even a single planet orbiting another Sun-like star. (A few appeared to orbit around pulsars, but pulsars are generally considered to be "dead" stars.)

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