Feb. 25, 2019
When 51 Pegasi b was the first planet orbiting a Sun-like star discovered outside our solar system in 1995, the question of whether life exists in other corners of our galaxy shifted from, “Do exoplanets exist?” to “How do we recognize whether an exoplanet can support life?”
Since then, NASA’s Kepler mission and ground-based surveys of exoplanets have revealed some profound findings: Earth-sized, potentially habitable worlds around other stars in our galaxy are extremely common—in fact, scientists theorize… Read more