Twenty years of hunting exoplanets has given us nearly 2000 chunks of non-fusing rock and gas. It’s also given us the statistics to show that the galaxy is likely to be filled to the brim with other worlds, giving incredible potential for finding other Earths and maybe even other life. The latest discoveries involve the use of better technology, more intuitive methods, and more comprehensive searches. This means that we aren’t just discovering planets that are further from Earth, we are finding the ones that are nearby, but small enough to have been hidden, until now. The red dwarf star...
The Earth, along with the rest of the solar system, was born around 4.6 Billion years ago. At that time, Earth was part of the early group of habitable planets to form in the Universe. According to a new theoretical study from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), the vast majority of Earth-like planets has yet to form. Using data from the Hubble space Telescope (HST) and the Kepler Space Telescope (KST), astronomers were able to come up with a theoretical model of cosmic evolution, detailing how planets will form over the entire lifespan of the Universe. “Our main motivation was...
When the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope comes a few years from now, we will have then opportunity to probe deeper into the cosmos than ever before, to see things we had only dreamed of seeing previously. Among the prime targets for this modern marvel of human ingenuity are potentially habitable exoplanets, where future humans could live, provided there isn’t already life occupying the real estate. To help astronomers assign importance to the growing number of exoplanets, researchers at the University of Washington’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory have devised an index to represent the habitability of worlds, near and...
Space is Big. I say this often, but it is so vast we can’t even comprehend the emptiness of it. We see Billions upon Billions of stars, all taunting us with their shine, seemingly close but completely unreachable. How do we know which stars we should spend our time looking at? We don’t really have the time to scan through each star in detail, so what are the criteria for taking a closer look? Generally we look at a population of stars to gain an understanding of each life stage, and then we look at the oldest and youngest to determine...
