Xanthippa's Chamberpot

We studied our Solar system an thought we understood how all kinds of solar systems form.

Then we looked around…and the evidence does not fit our hypothesies:

‘As of this month, we’ve discovered 884 planets, 692 planetary systems, 132 of them with more than one planet and, strange to tell, almost none of them look like us.

“We are now beginning to understand that nature seems to overwhelmingly prefer [planetary] systems that have multiple planets with orbits of less than 100 days,” says Steve Vogt, astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “This is quite unlike our own solar system, where there is nothing with an orbit inside that of Mercury. So our solar system is, in some sense, a bit of a freak and not the most typical kind of system that Nature cooks up.”

All of sudden, we’re the abnormal ones. We have to figure out why our solar system turned out different from all the others.’