What the Discovery of Hundreds of New Planets Means for Astronomy- and Philosophy
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New telescopes are allowing us to look at space more accurately than ever - and what they uncover could change our world
The other night I trained my telescope on a few stars that resemble the Sun and are now known to have planets—inconspicuous and previously unheralded stars such as 61 Virginis and 47 Ursae Majoris, each found to be orbited by at least three planets, and HD 81040, home to a gas giant six times as massive as mighty Jupiter.
I could see none of the actual planets—lost in the glare of their stars, exoplanets can only rarely be discerned through even the largest telescopes—but just knowing they were there enhanced the experience. Watching those yellow stars dancing in the eyepiece, I found myself grinning widely in the dark, like an interstellar Peeping Tom.
When I was a boy, the prospect of finding exoplanets was as dim and distant as the planets themselves. Theorists had their theories, but nobody knew whether planets were commonplace or cosmically rare. My 1959 edition of the opulent Larousse Encyclopedia of Astronomy noted that no planets of other stars had yet been identified, but predicted that “future instrumental and technical improvements may confidently be expected to reveal many things that are now hidden.”
And so they did. Thanks to space telescopes, digital cameras, high-speed computers and other innovations scarcely dreamt of a half century ago, astronomers today have located hundreds of exoplanets. Thousands more are awaiting confirmation. New worlds are being discovered on an almost daily basis.
These revelations advance the quest to find extraterrestrial life, help scientists better understand how our solar system evolved and provide a more accurate picture of how the universe—which is to say, the system that created us—actually works.