The Search For Inhabitable Exoplanets

A red dwarf star’s HZ, for example, would be much closer to the star itself compared with that of our sun. It is also important to determine the planet’s size and mass, which is imperative in deciding whether it can sustain an atmosphere. Maintaining an atmosphere is essential for life to exist and small a planet with a small gravitational force at its surface may not be capable of retaining one. The Kepler transit data can only measure planet masses, diameters, orbital periods, and parent star types and although this information is useful for determining habitable zones, further data is required to determine true habitability. The latter can be done by studying the composition of the exoplanet’s atmosphere.

sun than Earth, or 97 Astronomical Units (AU). For comparison, Pluto is 40 AU from the sun.

In the article called “Another Earth” by Alice Savage and David Wiece started with the sharing of the theory that life outside of Earth could exist. The author’s son thinks that it’s possible for other living being to exist and live on other planets, but the author had this theory as just a theory until the moment when scientist found a lot of planets that can potentially have live life on them. After that, he starts to share his memories about what people thought about life outside of Earth back in the 70’s. He shares this idea that to find a planet we have to look at stars. He talks about two methods of how we can find a planet looking at a star. Planets have their gravitational pull and when they are moving around a star we can see them

have yet been detected on any of the nearly 2,000 scientifically confirmed exoplanets. So we

If other solar systems are anything like ours, they are bound to have many planets. Not all habitable, but planets none the

much a star wobbles or goes around the centre of gravity of the exoplanet and star, the violent wobbles must conclude that 51 Pegasi b is a Jupiter sized exoplanet. Hd209458 b is also a Jupiter sized exoplanet, which may have been determined using the calculation or the wobble method, having similar affects to its host stars light spectrum as 51 Pegasi b has on its host star. Astronomers are unsure whether the exoplanet named Kepler 22b is a larger Earth or more of a mini Neptune, as it is boarder line between a rocky planet and a gas dwarf.

Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz established another milestone, recording 51 Pegasi b, also known as Bellerophon, as the first established exoplanet in 1995. Located about 50 million light years away in the constellation Pegasus, Bellerophon is known as the first planet outside our solar system that orbits a star similar to our sun with the help of spectroscopy. Spectroscopy is described as the study of communication amongst matter and electromagnetic radiation. It used to consider visible light scattered according to its wavelength by a prism, but later the idea was developed to contain any contact with radiative energy as a function of its wavelength or frequency. Technological advances, most notably in high-resolution spectroscopy, led to

Many people found and/or saw the peculiar planets but had not realized what they had saw till months later years even! To this day both America and Europe claim to have found the “first”. To find these Exoplanets, scientists discovered a destroyed star known as a ‘pulsar’. This pulsar, is a core star that had died in a supernova explosion. It shoots radio waves out which helps scientists locate said planets. ‘Wolszczan’ found two ‘pulsars’ by 1992 and another, two years later. another exoplanet was discovered by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz in 1995. This exoplanet came to be known as fifty-one peg. In 1989 The discovery of the first exoplanet was announced, though it is still unknown of whether it was discovered by someone from America or

The topic of finding life on another planet, or seeing if we are the only ones in our Universe has been a mystery to us since the beginning of time. One of the closest findings NASA has found to this topic was exoplanets. Exoplanet is defined as a planet that orbits a star outside the solar system. NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope is the main telescope used to search for exoplanets that have similar features to Earth, and habitability on these exoplanets. NASA has found over 2,000 exoplanets so far, and out of those, there are only about eight exoplanets that seem to have a possibility on being a habitable exoplanets. Among these eight, Kepler 62f seems to be the most plausible.

Currently, there is only one planet we know of to host life, and that is our home planet Earth. The question remains as to what is exactly needed for a planet to be considered habitable, but scientists have developed a handful of criteria to help distinguish what planets could be “just right” for life. The ongoing search for possible habitable planets has produced many remarkable findings but nothing quite as extraordinary as the discovery of the system Trappist-1. According to nasa.gov, it is the first known system of seven Earth-size planets around a single star, and it meets the criteria to possibly sustain life (“NASA Telescope Reveals” p.1). This discovery poses a likely answer to the question “are we alone” and drives our search for finding out more about what is out there.

According to Vocativ, NASA's constant discovery of new planets has reached its dull point, leading the reaction of some into a simple comment: "Again." The comments refer to the fact that the Kepler telescope has so far discovered a total of 1,031 planets outside the Earth's solar system, which makes the new planet discovery a seen-before

The main searches for exoplanets are being done by space missions. The Kepler space mission is finding the most exoplanets, however there are many other space missions like Gaia, MOST, CoRoT, and SWEEPS, that are finding exoplanets in habitable zones. There are also ground missions including the Anglo Australian Planet Search and HARPS which is done in Geneva. This graph shows all the exoplanets found that are less than 10Me or 1.5Re mapped on the habitable zone. The sizes of the circles indicate the radius of the planet, which has been estimated, if not

To begin with, there is more than one sun out there in space, and a sun can contain about one million planets in space. Scientists have discovered about one thousand planets orbiting distant stars. They have much more to discover! There is a big possibility that in one of those planets life could exist. Another big clue that scientist have discovered is that there are many galaxies in space and we live in one. The galaxy that Earth is located at is called the Milky Way Galaxy. A galaxy can contain many planets just like our galaxy can contains over billions of planets.

The first exoplanet found, Peg 51 b, challenged the then present theory of giant planet formation. Models of giant planet formation stated that Jupiter-like planets form at distances of 4-5 AU, AU being the distance from

our solar system, but they are unimportant compared to the nine major planets. In this paper I will discuss the planets and how they are each unique.