Exoplanet is a field of astronomy since 1995 when a planet which was outside our solar system was discovered by 2 astronomers: Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz. This planet was orbiting around its own star, just like the Earth does with the Sun.
Today, there are no more than 3,600 of these planets, and there’s a possibility there are even more in our Galaxy.
How many are there?
Exoplanet has extended ever since then, and now there are 95 more on the list, thanks to the researchers of NASA, Caltech, and Denmark. This was published in Astronomical Journal thanks to the Kepler Space Telescope, aka K2.
What’s the process of finding planets?
To find more planets, K2 orbits the earth and looks carefully at different patches in the sky. It uses the light of the stars when it looks for light fluctuations, a thing that happens when exoplanets get in front of their stars. They first found 275 possible planets, out of which 149 were real exoplanets and 95 were discovered as being new.
Andrew Mayo, which is a PhD student at the Technical University of Denmark stated that the signals were either caused by a system of stars, or by the noise from the spacecraft. Some planets were even smaller than Earth, or bigger than Jupiter.
What’s the main reason of this research?
The whole idea of this research is that people will eventually find Exoplanets, and not only – maybe other planets, too – which are as the same size of the Earth and in which will be able to live. There are some space missions which are about to happen, such as James Webb Space Telescope and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which are going to lead the way in getting to know the Milky Way better. They will show us information about potential planets like Earth.
And this is truly important – if we discover other planets, astronomers will get a better idea of what’s in there, and what’s the nature of those planets and things will be put in perspective.
But as for now, we stick with only one question: are there really other planets which can provide us with a healthy life?
