What are the billions of stars and planets beyond our solar system up to? Do they behave like ours or are we a freak of nature?
While definitive answers are far from nailed down, a recent deluge of observations released by NASA's Kepler space telescope has tripled the number of candidate alien planets, taking the total to 1235, and has already yielded many tantalising revelations.
"We're starting to see what's out there; the groups of planets that exist," says Gregory Laughlin at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who is not part of the Kepler team but is studying their data closely. "It's very exciting."
When NASA announced the release of the new data on 2 February, the initial headlines focused on possible habitable planets and an intriguing six-planet star system. More recently, excitement at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington DC centred on a planet candidate that might be an Earth "twin". Yet the new release from Kepler offers many more insights that have received relatively little attention so far.
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