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Exoplanets: Understanding Our Place in the Cosmos

Did you know that there are 3,610 exoplanets, in 2,704 planetary systems and 610 multiple planetary systems according to Schneider, J. “Interactive Extra-solar Planets Catalog”, The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia?

An exoplanet is a planet outside of our solar system that orbits a star, and we have thousands of them. Before 1992, we didn’t even know of any other planets in the solar system. Exoplanets vary from what they look like, what they are made of, and what their environment is.

Some of the exoplanets are rocky, some are gaseous, and some are very, very odd. But there’s one thing each one of these strange new worlds has in common: All have advanced scientific understanding of our place in the cosmos.” says Adam Hadhazy, a writer for NASA, about the exoplanets in the vast place above called space.

It is said that these planets can hold human life. They are just the right distance from their “sun” and have the necessities for survival.

And once again, there are thousands of them. The possibilities and ideas that one could have are endless for the future of mankind.

The Kepler space telescope has discovered 6 planet solar systems since 2009. This only shows more of how much we don’t know about the rest of the universe.

We have only just discovered that there is a possibility of more planets like our small blue one. Who knows what else we could discover and what that could lead to?

Nasa’s Kepler mission has found 219 more exoplanets, and 10 are earth sized. “The Kepler data set is unique, as it is the only one containing a population of these near-Earth analogs: planets with roughly the same size and orbit as Earth,” Mario Perez, a program scientist, states at the NASA Ames Research Center in California.

TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, will explore and search the skies. It will observe each star for thirty days, making sure it gets a good look and hopefully getting more information on our universe.

New planets, a new life. Very soon this idea that came from a telescope will be a reality, and in the future, everyone will have gone to space. And some will get to start anew, with a new world.


Written by Isabel Rasmussen

Isabel Rasmussen. Athlete, writer, space enthusiast and believes in aliens.

 

 

 

Featured image courtesy of NASA.

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