Part 2 of 2 With such a large proportion of identified exoplanets in the super-Earth to sub-Neptune class, an inescapable question arises: how conducive might they be to the origin and maintenance of life? So little is actually know about the characteristics of these planets that are larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune …
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Part 1 of 2 When the first exoplanet was identified and confirmed 20 years ago, there was enormous excitement, a sense of historic breakthrough and, with almost parallel intensity, sheer bewilderment. The planet, 51 Pegasi B, was larger than Jupiter yet orbited its parent star in 4 days. In other words, it was much closer …
Continue reading "On Super-Earths, Sub-Neptunes and Some Lessons They Teach"
Imagine counting all the people who have ever lived on Earth, well over 100 billion of them. Then imagine counting all the planets now orbiting stars in our Milky Way galaxy , and in particular the ones that are roughly speaking Earth-sized. Not so big that the planet turns into a gas giant, and not so …
Throughout the history of science, moments periodically arrive when new fields of knowledge and discovery just explode. Cosmology was a kind of dream world until Edwin Hubble established that the universe was expanding, and doing so at an ever-faster rate. A far more vibrant and scientific discipline was born. On a more practical level, it …
Many Worlds 