01
THE BLOG
Could there be an even better planet for us than Earth?
Scientists are searching for such super-habitable planets where life can thrive even more easily. And they are looking for exoplanets (those planets which do not belong to our solar system).
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Looking for an exoplanet is a tedious job, it cannot be seen through a telescope present on Earth and even sending a telescope in the outer space wouldn’t help much, one such telescope which was launched by NASA with the prime aim to search for exoplanets was Kepler. During its journey to the regions of the Milky Way Galaxy for almost 10 years, it confirmed existence of more than 4000 exoplanets with the help of Transit method.
There is no real photo of an exoplanet till date, because of its distance from the Sun and our solar system which ranges from 20 ly to >300 ly (ly stands for light year). Hence, what we see from powerful telescopes is just the glare of the respective star which the exoplanet(s) orbit. Another method is used to determine the presence of an exoplanet known as TRANSIT METHOD, this method is used by telescopes. When an exoplanet transits (passes) their respective star(s) a small fluctuation is observed by the powerful telescopes and visualises the presence of an exoplanet. The process is quite complex, so let’s not dive into boring scientific terms.
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Even if scientists find a super-earth which is very much suitable for colonisation, we humans have impacted the Earth in the most dangerous way possible, we have forgotten that we are just mere “guests” on this planet and the real owner of the planet is mother nature. Technically, every human has 2 min. to live on Earth until we breathe oxygen and the timer resets itself, and the precious oxygen is provided by nature. So, why not instead of finding a new place to colonise develop a sustainable method to live which does not undermines the health of nature and increases our life here on Earth which we call as ‘home’ a bit more. Because, it is truly said by Dorothy in the movie ‘The wizard of Oz’, that there’s no place like home.
02
THE FACTS
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Extraterrestrial life probably exists on the Exoplanet Kepler 186-F. This planet is located in the habitable zone of its star and it’s only slightly larger than Earth. But Kepler 186 is located 490 light-years away.
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Located 15 light-years away, the Exoplanet Gliese 832-C is also potentially habitable, but it is 5.4 times larger than Earth. A year there lasts 36 days.
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The oldest known Exoplanet is Kapteyn-B located in the red dwarf system 13 light-years from Earth. Its age is about 11.5 billion years.
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Kepler 78-B has almost the same size as Earth does, but it orbits 90 times closer to its star. The temperature on the surface of this Exoplanet is 2700-5400 °F (1500-3000 °C).
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The Exoplanet closest to Earth is Alpha Centauri C b located in 4.2 light-years from our Solar System. By the way, Alpha Centauri C b is potentially habitable.
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Earth-like exoplanet Kepler 238-B may once have been theoretically habitable, but the powerful radiation of it’s star turned it into a radioactive wasteland.
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It’s estimated than around 20% of the stars out there like our Sun have a planet like Earth orbiting it.
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till date there are 4,383 confirmed exoplanets out of which 1,350 are estimated to be super-earth.
03
THE MISSIONS
there are currently 42 active projects and 10 ongoing + ended space missions which are dedicated for searching new exoplanets with the help of telescopes.
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kepler is one the most famous space telescope due to its high-end accuracy. it was launched by nasa on march 7, 2009 and when was shut down on nov 15, 2018 due to low battery and it still wanders out there in dark space alone. during its lifespan of almost 10 years, it made pretty big ground-breaking discoveries such as spotting kepler-452b which was quoted as "earth 2.0" because it had almost every property same as that of earth.
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another important project is 'harps', installed by the eso (european southern observatory). it is one the most precise ground-based projects which has spotted 130+ exoplanets till date.
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another important space mission after kepler is 'tess' which was launched in 2018 with the same prime aim as that of kepler but will cover 400 times the area covered by kepler using transit method. it is estimated that during it's lifetime it was find around 3.000+ exoplanets. one of the most fascinating thing about tess is that it is guest investigator program which means that any scientists from any of the space organisations can use it for their own research work, thus it also covers 20,000 additional celestial bodies making it one of it's kind.
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some other future planned projects are 'jwst, plato, ariel, rst' and many more...
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