Is our solar system unique?
Here we are on the small, water covered, rocky planet orbiting
a medium sized yellow star.
We're one of eight planets all different from one another.
The ones close to our sun are small and made of rock.
The ones farther out are huge and made of gas.
Orbiting the sun with them are many other smaller objects.
Comets, asteroids, lots of moons,
planetary rings, things we used to think were planets,
vast fields of planet sized ice chunks,
and tiny specks of dust, all of these things
make up our solar system.
And for a long time we thought that's how all solar systems
would look, but back in the '90s we started to find out
that wasn't true.
Astronomers found giant gas planets so close to their stars
that their atmospheres boil away into space.
They found planets orbiting double star systems.
They found super-earths 10 times our own planet's mass.
Why are these planetary systems so different?
Is our little solar system a cosmic oddball?
To find out we need to know more about how planets form.
And to do that, we need NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.