Wow.

“This newly discovered system is called Kepler-36, and it’s about 1,200 light years away. One of its planets is a rocky super-Earth about 1.5 times the size of our planet and 4.5 times the mass. Its companion, a Neptune-like gaseous planet, is 3.7 times the size of Earth and eight times the mass. And they’re very close to each other – about 30 times closer than any pair of planets in our solar system.

Because their orbital distance varies by only 10%, the view of the Neptune-like planet from the rocky planet must at times be pretty spectacular.”

This could dramatically change how I create solar systems in my books; it simply never occurred to me to have very different planets that close to each other. Thanks, science!

Full article on io9 here.