SIMILAR SYSTEMS

Our Solar System isn’t unique. There are more than 3,200 stars in the Milky Way known to have planets orbiting them. One of the ‘closest’ examples is over 2,000 light years away from Earth: the Kepler-11 planetary system. Kepler-11 is the system’s central star – a yellow dwarf star which is similar in size to the ice giants Uranus and Neptune. There are six known planets in this system, all of which orbit much closer to their star than most of the planets in our Solar System. The closest is Kepler-11b, which is around ten times closer to Kepler-11 than Earth is to the Sun. The outermost planet is Kepler-11g, orbiting its star from around 43 million miles away, which would place it between Mercury and Venus in our Solar System.