Europa is a moon no bigger than our own and is covered by deep layers of ice, but it brings with it a world of promise. Science fiction master and sometimes space visionary Arthur C. Clarke, after all, named it as the most likely spot in our solar system to harbor life, and wrote a …
Proxima b Is Surely Not "Earth-like." But It’s A Research Magnet And Just May Be Habitable.
It is often discussed within the community of exoplanet scientists that a danger lies in the description of intriguing exoplanets as "Earth-like." Nothing discovered so far warrants the designation, which is pretty nebulous anyway. Size and the planet's distance from a host star are usually what earn it the title "Earth-like," with its inescapable expectation …
Coming to Terms With Biosignatures
The search for life beyond our solar system has focused largely on the detection of an ever-increasing number of exoplanets, determinations of whether the planets are in a habitable zone, and what the atmospheres of those planets might look like. It is a sign of how far the field has progressed that scientists are now …
Juno, Jupiter and Exo-Jupiters
The last NASA mission to orbit Jupiter, the Galileo, was designed, flown and its data analyzed as if it was circling the only Jupiter in the sky. This is hardly surprising since the spacecraft launched in 1989, before the exoplanet era had arrived. Ironically, Galileo entered its Jupiter orbit in late 1995, just a few …
Out of the Stovepipes and Into the Galaxy
This “Many Worlds” post is written by Andrew Rushby, a postdoctoral fellow from the United Kingdom who recently began working with NASA's NExSS initiative. The column will hopefully serve to both introduce this new NExSS colleague and to let him share his thoughts about the initiative and what lies ahead. I’m most excited to join …
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Breaking Down Exoplanet Stovepipes
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 …
Storming the One-Meter-Per-Second Barrier
When the first exoplanet was identified via the radial velocity method, the Swiss team was able to detect a wobble in the star 51 Pegasi at a rate of 50 meters per second. The wobble is the star's movement back and forth caused by the gravitational pull of the planet, and in that first case …
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Ranking Exoplanet Habitability
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 …
Hunting for Exoplanets Via TESS
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 …
The Search for Exoplanet Life Goes Broad and Deep
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 …
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Many Worlds 