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 …
Shredding Exoplanets, And The Mysteries They May Unravel
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 …
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Movement in The Search For ExoLife
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, …
Enceladus and Water Worlds
As if the prospect of billions of potentially habitable exoplanets wasn't enough to get people excited, what about all those watery exo-moons too? The question arises as the Cassini mission makes its final pass near the now famous geysers at the south pole of the moon Enceladus. The plumes are currently in darkness and …
Exoplanet Earth
Some two billion years ago, all of Earth may well have been covered in snow and ice. Oceans, continents, everything, and for many millions of years. Observed from afar, the planet would be pretty low on the list of planets that might conceivably support life. But we know that it did. Five hundred to seven …
The Exoplanet Era
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 