The quest to find habitable -- and perhaps inhabited -- planets and moons beyond Earth focuses largely on their location in a solar system and the nature of its host star, the eccentricity of its orbit, its size and rockiness, and the chemical composition of its atmosphere, assuming that it has one. Astronomy, astrophysics, cosmochemistry …
Continue reading "The Interiors of Exoplanets May Well Hold the Key to Their Habitability"
For years now, finding planets in the habitable zones of their host stars has been a global astrophysical quest and something of a holy grail. That distance from a star where temperatures could allow H20 to remain liquid some of the time has been deemed the "Goldilocks" zone where life could potentially emerge and …
Continue reading "Exoplanets With Complex Life May Be Very Rare, Even in Their “Habitable Zones”"
Four years ago, the International Astronomical Union organized a competition to give popular names to 14 stars and 31 exoplanets that orbit them. The event encouraged 570,000 people to vote and the iconic planet 51 Pegasi b became "Dimidium, " 55 Cancri b became "Galileo," and (among others) Formalhaut b became "Dagon." It remains unclear …
Continue reading "A Grand Global Competition to Name 100 ExoWorlds"
With so many exoplanets already detected, with the pace of discovery continuing to be so fast, and with efforts to find more distant worlds so constant and global, it's easy to become somewhat blase´ about new discoveries. After so many "firsts," and so many different kinds of planets found in very different ways, it certainly …
Virtually every definition of the word "life" includes the capability to undergo Darwinian evolution as a necessary characteristic. This is true of life on Earth and of thinking about what would constitute life beyond Earth. If it can't change, the thinking goes, then it cannot be truly alive. In addition, evolutionary selection and change occurs …
Continue reading "A New and Revelatory Window Into Evolution on Earth"
The very first planet detected outside our solar system powerfully made clear that our prior understanding of what planets and solar systems could be like was sorely mistaken. 51 Pegasi was a Jupiter-like massive gas planet, but it was burning hot rather than freezing cold because it orbited close to its host star -- circling …
All of a sudden, we have spacecraft and objects both coming into our solar system and leaving for interstellar space. This is highly unusual, and very intriguing. The departing spacecraft is Voyager 2, which launched in 1977 and has traveled spaceward some 11 billion miles. It has now officially left the heliosphere, the protective …
In 2016, the La Silla Observatory in Chile spotted evidence of possibly the most eagerly anticipated exoplanet in the Galaxy. It was a world orbiting the nearest star to the sun, Proxima Centauri, making this our closest possible exoplanet neighbour. Moreover, the planet might even be rocky and temperate. Proxima Centauri b had been …
Continue reading "Does Proxima Centauri Create an Environment Too Horrifying for Life?"
Astronomers have found that Barnard's star -- a very close, fast-moving, and long studied red dwarf -- has a super-Earth sized planet orbiting just beyond its habitable zone. The discovery relied on data collected over many years using the tried-and-true radial velocity method, which searches for wobbles in the movement of the host star. …
In the known history of our 4.5-billion-year-old solar system, the insides of but one planet have been explored and studied. While there's a lot left to know about the crust, the mantle and the core of the Earth, there is a large and vibrant field dedicated to that learning. Sometime next month, an extensive survey …
Continue reading "Probing The Insides of Mars to Learn How Rocky Planets Are Formed"
Many Worlds 