How different from Earth are distant exoplanets?
Image Credit: NASA / Goddard Space Flight Center
Dave Charbonneau: One of the big delights in the last decade has been that we’ve uncovered a great diversity in the planets orbiting other stars.
Dave Charbonneau is an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He’s talking about the discovery so far of over 300 exoplanets – planets that lie beyond our solar system.
Dave Charbonneau: We’re getting to the point in terms of studying planets from other stars where we can actually compare different planets to try to understand why they’re different, and what causes those differences, i.e. are they made of different stuff, did they form by different process, and are their atmospheres significantly different.
Chabonneau’s observed the light an exoplanet emits as it passes by its parent star, to actually see what gases are in the atmospheres of those distant worlds, light-years away. Ultimately what Charbonneau searches for, and no human has yet found, is a distant planet like Earth with a life-giving atmosphere.
Dave Charbonneau: I think that we will soon have, for the first time in human history, the sensitivity to actually find one. I think everyone regardless of whether they’re a scientist or not, has wondered about the Earth’s place in the universe and about the possibility of life on other planets. And by looking for and finding analogues of the Earth, this is really our first step to address that question.
Hey man this is really kool man I wish I can go out in space to go to other spaces man I want to float in the sky to man it must really kool floating in the sky. well got to go bye ttyl
Oh wow what a great news i also wanna be an astronaut but my parents forced to be computer engineer.Anyway i would also love to go on space and its really exiciting.And dave collect more information about earth like planet and paste it in this site. I love studying more about space and planets…….