systems would be arranged like your own, with small, rocky planets closest to the sun and massive gas giants farther away. But this is not the case at all. You imagined that planets in solar systems would be comfortably spaced apart like yours, and would trace relatively clean, relatively circular orbits. Again, this is far from the truth. You imagined that all solar systems would have a single star at their centers. Yet you have learned that eighty-five percent of them are part of binary star systems, in which two stars orbit closely around each other. “The truth is that the actual
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