David Kipping

They bobble the star a ton.

So they're pretty easy to spot.

So we're pretty confident that sun-like stars, it's kind of not typical for them to have these Jupiter-sized planets.

And we've got two of them.

So that seems interesting to our own origin in the solar system.

And similarly, having eight planets, that's pretty unusual.

We don't see many systems with that many planets packed together.

How many solar systems are binary solar systems as opposed to having a single star?

Yeah, about half of all stars live in binary systems.

It's very common.

It's actually Alpha Centauri AB.

That's the nearest star system to us.

And it's actually a trinary.

There's Alpha AB that go around each other really close.

And then there's Proxima Centauri, which is on the outside.

And actually, just this morning, Joe, just this morning, there was an announcement of a giant planet around Alpha Centauri.

It's a candidate.

We don't know if it's confirmed yet, but it's kind of in the habitable zone, so the distance where, in principle, you could have liquid water on the surface of a rocky planet.

So it is a candidate for a planet?

Yes.