[Jillian's blog] Exoplanets, Tech, and Space Travel
Fomalhaut + Fomalhaut b; courtesy of NASA, ESA, UC Berkeley, NASA GSFC, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and NASA JPL-Caltech)
For a lot of people, exoplanets are some of the most exciting discoveries in current astronomy. The first exoplanets were detected in 1992 orbiting the pulsar PSR B1257+12, all three of which were confirmed in 2007. In 1995, 51 Pegasi became the first main sequence star to have an exoplanet detected around it. In the years since, interest in exoplanets increased as they became easier to discover and there are now seventy-four NASA-confirmed planets outside our solar system, and thousands more are under close watch to see if they’ll make the cut. But long before we knew for sure they were there, even centuries before the excitement within the field today, astronomers wondered if there were any “other earths” out there – and a lot of them were confident that there were! As it turns out they were right, but a lot of what people hear about exoplanets (or exosolar planets, or extrasolar planets, pick your flavor) doesn’t come from scientific sources, which can breed some interesting discrepancies between science-fiction and science-reality. Read more »
Tags: exoplanets, Kepler, stars, voyager
Blogs | Jillian Brown | 
July 24, 2012 6:38 pm | 
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