科学美国人60秒 SSS 奇怪的太阳系（在线收听）

You Live In a Strange Solar System

The more astronomers study the heavens, the more they realize: our solar system is weird."There are a few things that make the solar system kind of strange.”Lauren Weiss, an astrophysicist at the University of Montreal. "One of which is we have a giant planet. Only about 10 percent of sunlike stars have a giant planet. And there are probably even fewer that have two giant planets."

天文学家越研究天堂越意识到：我们的太阳系是非常奇怪的。“有几件事让太阳系有点奇怪。” 蒙特利尔大学的天体物理学家Lauren Weiss说道。“其中之一是我们有一个巨大的星球，只有大约百分之十像太阳一样的恒星有一个巨大的行星，有两个行星的恒星少之又少。

In addition to giant Jupiter and lesser giant Saturn, we have tiny Mercury—just a bit bigger than Earth’s moon.So if we’re weird, what does a typical solar system look like? Weiss and her team trained their telescopes on 355 star systems known to host a handful of small exoplanets. And they found that most of the planets within individual star systems tended to be similar in size.

除了巨大的木星和较小的土星之外，我们还有较小的水星——比月亮稍微大一些。所以很奇怪，典型的太阳系是什么样的呢?Weiss和她团队用望远镜观察了355星系统已知的少数小型系外行星，他们发现，大多数恒星系统内的行星往往有着相近的大小。

"So if I'm a planet, and I'm, say, two times the size of Earth, my neighbor, the next planet over, is also likely to be two times the size of Earth, give or take a little bit."And they were strung out at similar distances from each other too…like peas in a pod, she says. Compared to that orderly array, our system looks more like, "Uh let's see, if I stick with food…I don't know…like a whole Thanksgiving dinner or something?"

“所以，如果我是一个行星，而且我是地球大小的两倍，我邻居也就是下一个行星，其体积可能是地球大小的两倍。 她说：“它们彼此之间也有类似的距离，就像豆荚中的豌豆一样。”与那个有序阵列相比，我们的系统看起来更像是：如果我喜爱食物，我们可以看到......那么整个恒星系统就就像感恩节一套晚餐?”

The results are in The Astronomical Journal.

该研究结果发表在《天文学报》上。

As for hunting for habitable worlds: "If we're trying to find an Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone”—not too close to the star but not too far away either—“and we find an Earth-sized planet closer in, it might be worthwhile to continue searching for planets around that star."Because there might just be a few more peas in the pod.

至于寻找可居住的世界：“如果我们试图寻找类似地球大小的适合居住的行星”——距离恒星不近也不远——“我们发现，一个地球大小的行星更接近，可能值得继续寻找这颗恒星周围的行星。“因为豆荚中可能有更多的豌豆啊~