It is hardly surprising that in this burgeoning exoplanet era of ours, those hitherto unknown planets get most of the attention when it comes to exo-solar systems. What are the planet masses? Their orbits? The chemical makeup of their atmospheres? Their potential capacity to hold liquid surface water and thereby become "habitable." Less frequently …
Continue reading "Forget the "Habitable Zone," Think the "Biogenic Zone""
What can get the imagination into super-drive more quickly than the crashing of really huge objects? Like when a Mars-sized planet did a head-on into the Earth and, the scientific consensus says, created the moon. Or when a potentially dinosaur-exterminating asteroid heads towards Earth, or when what are now called "near-Earth objects" seems to be …
That fields of science can benefit greatly from cross-fertilization with other disciplines is hardly a new idea. We have, after all, long-standing formal disciplines such as biogeochemistry -- a mash-up of many fields that has the potential to tell us more about the natural environment than any single approach. Astrobiology in another field that inherently …
Now that we know that there are billions and billions of planets beyond our solar system, and we even know where thousands of confirmed and candidate planets are located, where should we be looking for those planets that could in theory support extraterrestrial life, and might just possibly support it now? The first order …
Seven years ago this month the Kepler spacecraft launched into space – the first NASA mission dedicated to searching for planets around distant stars. The goal was to conduct a census of these exoplanets, to learn whether planets are common or rare. And in particular, to understand whether planets like Earth are common or …
From an Earth-centric 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"
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, …
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""
Many Worlds 