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    We’re the Cosmic 1 Percent But Our Solar System Isn’t a Complete Weirdo

    by Sean Raymond Jan 05, 2021 4 minutes

    About half of all stars seem to have “super-Earth” planets on orbits closer to their stars than Mercury is to the Sun, but we don’t.Illustration by Vadim Sadovski / Shutterstock

    Is Earth unique? Once a grand philosophical question, it has, over the past two decades, become, with the discovery of thousands of planets around other stars—our cosmic cousins—a scientific one.

    One way to address it is to imagine aliens, using present-day Earth technology, searching our solar system for exoplanets. Which of our eight planets would they find? The answer is . Our exoplanet-searching techniques look for the effect of planets on their host star,

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