Planet the Drake equation, which estimates the number of intelligent, communicating civilizations that exist in the Milky Way. There are exoplanets that are much closer to their parent star than any planet in the Solar System is to the Sun, and there are also exoplanets that are much farther from their star. Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun at 0.4 AU, takes 88 days for an orbit, but the shortest known orbits for exoplanets take only a few hours, e.g. Kepler-70b. The Kepler-11 system has five of its planets in shorter orbits than Mercury's, all of them much more massive
Nearest neighbour distribution Nearest neighbour distribution In probability and statistics, a nearest neighbor function, nearest neighbor distance distribution, nearest-neighbor distribution function or nearest neighbor distribution is a mathematical function that is defined in relation to mathematical objects known as point processes, which are often used as mathematical models of physical phenomena representable as randomly positioned points in time, space or both. More specifically, nearest neighbor functions are defined with respect to some point in the point process as being the probability distribution of the distance from this point to its nearest neighboring point in the same point process, hence they are used to