Secondly, the detection of multiple planets demolishes once and for all the lingering doubts of some astronomers that the single planets found around other stars are not planets at all, but small, faint components in otherwise conventional binary star systems.
But special elections are won and lost on turnout, and GOP operatives wisely sensed early on that an upset was possible if all of the planets aligned perfectly.
"We simulated all the possible configurations we could think of - and we found out that they could only account for 9.5% of Kepler planets, and all the rest are bona fide planets, " Dr Fressin explained.
"It means we're really in the arena where it's possible to detect all the planets of our Solar System, but around other stars, " he told BBC News.
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It appears that ordinary matter -- all of the stuff that we can see, such as planets and stars -- makes up only 4.9% of all the universe.
So far, the research team has identified three planets circling Kepler-30, all of which orbit the star in the same plane.
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Small, rocky planets are the hardest of all to detect, but they are also the ones astrobiologists would most like to find.
The presence of multiple orbiting companions is incompatible with the mechanism of stellar formation so they must be planets after all.
Their model takes into account both general relativity and all known gravitational effects of the sun, the moon, the planets and large asteroids.
But existing plans to photograph extrasolar planets in this way involve orbiting arrays of reflecting telescopes all pointing in exactly the same direction.
Jack Lissauer, of NASA's Ames Research Centre, in California, and his team, have not only confirmed the existence of the six planets, they have worked out their orbital periods, diameters and, in all but one case, their masses.
It becomes gravitationally perturbed, with any big planets still orbiting the dead star then nudging smaller rocks in all directions - many of them towards the dwarf.
Much as I love the march of technology and innovation, I remain skeptical of the techno-optimists who are convinced that just around the corner is the technological solution to all of our problems, ushering in the singularity or, at the very least, the United Federation of Planets.
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Even if the planets did all line up perfectly there would be nothing to worry about, as a number of astronomers have demonstrated.
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