Recently, an M-class red dwarf star about 600 light-years from Earth was discovered to have a planet. This is not uncommon; M-dwarfs are the most common stars in our galaxy and many of them have planets.
But the wrinkle comes in when we look at the size of the planet, which scientists figure is about the size of Jupiter. In our own system, the Sun outsizes Jupiter by about a thousand times. But NGTS-1b orbits a star about half the size of our Sun, which makes for a star-planet ratio unprecedented in astronomy so far. Only three M-drwarfs have been discovered to have gas giants in orbit, and none of them is anywhere near as large as Jupiter.
So once again, the universe offers up a surprise to the people who keep looking at it and wondering what it's like -- which is part of what we call science, after all. The people who think all the science is settled and we know everything about stuff? Well, they're not looking for new things, so they probably won't ever find any.
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