For more than 20 years now -- even before the first detection of an extra-solar planet -- scientists have posited, defined and then debated the existence and nature of a habitable zone. It's without a doubt a central scientific concept, and the idea has caught on with the public (and the media) too. The discovery …
Continue reading "The Habitable Zone Gets Poked, Tweaked and Stretched to the Limits"
I had the good fortune several years ago to spend many hours in meetings of the science teams for the Curiosity rover, listening in on discussions about what new results beamed back from Mars might mean about the planet's formation, it's early history, how it gained and lost an atmosphere, whether it was a place …
Continue reading "The Search for Exoplanet Life Goes Broad and Deep"
From an Earthcentric point of view, rain of course means falling water. We can have storms with falling dust -- I experienced a few of those while a reporter in India -- but rain is pretty much exclusively H2O falling from the clouds. But as the study of exoplanets moves aggressively into the realm …
One of the seemingly quixotic goals of exoplanet scientists is to understand the chemical and geo-chemical compositions of the interiors of the distant planets they are finding. Learning whether a planet is largely made up of silicon or magnesium or iron-based compounds is essential to some day determining how and where specific exoplanets were …
Continue reading "Shredding Exoplanets, And The Mysteries They May Unravel"
There’s been a ton of justifiable excitement these days about the possible discovery of a ninth planet in our solar system — an object ten time the mass of Earth and 200 times further from the sun. Especially in the context of the recent demotion of Pluto from a planet to a dwarf planet, …
Continue reading "How Planet 9 Would Make Ours a More Typical Solar System"
Astronomers have been trying for decades to find a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the star closest to our sun and so a natural and tempting target. Claims of an exoplanet discovery have been made before, but so far none have held up. Now, in a novel and very public way, a group of European astronomers …
Assuming for a moment that life exists on some exoplanets, how might researchers detect it? This is hardly a new question. More than ten years ago, competing teams of exo-scientists and engineers came up with proposals for a NASA flagship space observatory capable of identifying possible biosignatures on distant planets. No consensus was reached, however, …
The IAU, in the person of Executive Committee member and former General Secretary Thierry Montmerle, wrote the following response to an earlier column, "(Mostly) Thumbs Down on ExoNames." The response to the article was first posted as a comment on the Many Worlds site, but to ensure that it is seen by readers I …
Spending time immersed in the world of exoplanets raises questions of all sorts, and some lead down unexpected pathways. In the aftermath of the 100th anniversary of the publication of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, another part of the great man’s legacy has entered into my life in a way both surprising and satisfying. I’ll …
Continue reading "Einstein, Cosmic Religion and the "Unaffiliated""
An earlier version of this article was accidently published last week before it was completed. This is the finished version, with information from this week's AAS annual conference. Let's face it: the field of exoplanets has a significant deficit when it comes to producing drop-dead beautiful pictures. We all know why. Exoplanets are just too …
Continue reading "How Will We Know What Exoplanets Look Like, and When?"
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