Scientific American 202503 The Missing Planets Summary
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A Solar System That Is Not Typical
For a long time, astronomers treated the solar system as a reasonable template for how planets ought to be arranged: small rocky worlds close to the star, giant gas planets farther out. The exoplanet era has broken that assumption. After the discovery of hot Jupiters in the 1990s and the flood of Kepler data that followed, planetary science shifted from studying one familiar system to comparing thousands of strange ones. The article argues that this broader view has created a new field, exoplanet demographics, which looks for large-scale patterns in whole populations of planets instead of treating each world as an isolated curiosity.
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