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I wonder which planets Kepler would see if someone used it to look at the Solar system from a far distance.


It's regularly detecting exoplanets down to slightly less than Earth-sized now, so assuming the orbits happened to be aligned the right way to make transits detectable at all, it should be able to detect all the planets except Mercury and Mars. Our hypothetical alien astronomers would put us down as a six-planet system, possibly worth a paper or two and a page in Alien Wikipedia :)


> It's regularly detecting exoplanets down to slightly less than Earth-sized now...

But at what distance from the host star can it detect planets of this size?




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