What is the evidence that suggests planetary systems are common in the universe?

1 Answer
George C.
May 21, 2016

By detecting planets using the transit method.

Explanation:

As far as we can tell, most sun-like stars have a planetary system.

The Kepler space telescope was tasked with finding planets using the transit method - observing periodic dips in the brightness of stars caused by planets moving in front of them. These dips in brightness are about #1# part in #10000#. To do this it has to keep focused on the same area of the sky for an extended period of time.

What is has observed is that the vast majority (I think #80%# plus) of sun-like stars have planets orbiting close to the star.

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