Here we go...

The danger with spending time on a careful post (see below) is that something hits the waves while you're at it. Take a normal G-dwarf star, stare at it with an ultra-high-precision spectrograph, wait, and find perhaps as many as 7 planets. This is the incredible announcement for the system of HD 10180 coming out of the European Southern Observatory.

5 definite 'Neptune' class worlds. One possible 'Saturn' and one itty-bitty 1.4 Earth mass object lurking on the hairy statistical edge of confirmation...

Not only that, but mostly close to circular orbits from almost on top of the star out to a few astronomical units.

It's a beautiful bit of astronomy, it's also a real eye-opener to the potential richness of planetary systems...there's planets in them there hills.....