Rebecca G. Martin¹ and Mario Livio^2
1Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 4505 South Maryland Parkway, Las Vegas, NV 89154, USA
²Space Telescope Science Institute, 3700 San Martin Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA

With the availability of considerably more data, we revisit the question of how special our solar system is compared to observed exoplanetary systems. To this goal, we employ a mathematical transformation that allows for a meaningful, statistical comparison. We find that the masses and densities of the giant planets in our solar system are very typical, as is the age of the solar system. While the orbital location of Jupiter is something of an outlier, this is most likely due to strong selection effects toward short-period planets. The eccentricities of the planets in our solar system are relatively small compared to those in observed exosolar systems, but are still consistent with the expectations for an 8-planet system (and could, in addition, reflect a selection bias toward high-eccentricity planets). The two characteristics of the solar system that we find to be most special are the lack of super-Earths with orbital periods of days to months and the general lack of planets inside of the orbital radius of Mercury. Overall, we conclude that, in terms of its broad characteristics, our solar system is not expected to be extremely rare, allowing for a level of optimism in the search for extrasolar life.

Reference
Martin RG and Livio M (2015) The solar system as an explanetary system. Astrophysical Journal 811:105.
Link to Article [doi:10.1088/0004-637X/810/2/105]