Google’s latest space-themed Doodle is exceptionally clever

On Wednesday, a team of astronomers revealed the discovery of a planetary system less than 40 light years away containing seven Earth-sized planets. The system's star is an ultracool dwarf, TRAPPIST-1, which is nothing to write home about—but astronomers gradually realized that the system has a plethora of planets, and that three of them could support water oceans on their surface.

Google, as it often does, commemorated the discovery with a Doodle:

(credit: Google)

Google Doodles have been around nearly as long as the search engine itself, with the first one commemorating Burning Man back in 1998:

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America is a trivia game where you don’t need to know much to win

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games. Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com.

Depending on whom you ask, I either cannot remember anything or I have a mind like a steel trap. My lovely wife would argue for option one, offering up as evidence my inability to remember family events and the location of common household items. I would counter by reciting the starting defense for the 1977 AFC Championship Denver Broncos (Carter, Chavous, Alzado, Swenson, Gradishar, T Jackson, Rizzo, B Jackson, Foley, Wright, Thompson), childhood addresses and phone numbers, and the only US president who served two, non-consecutive terms (Grover Cleveland).

Sure, keeping those datapoints in long-term storage isn’t all that useful most of the time, but they have led to my history of domination in Trivial Pursuit (I’ve only lost once in the countless games I've played since the game debuted in the 1980s). So when Nate Anderson showed up at my house a couple of weeks ago with a new trivia game called America, I was intrigued.

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