Category Archives: Exoplanets

Super Earths, what’s beyond the solar system?

Super Earth  CoRoT-7b next to Earth and Neptune for comparison, Source: Science News, Wikipedia The planets of the solar system, and the categories they fall into is basically common knowledge in this day and age. There are the rocky and dwarf worlds with a mass and size comparable or less than that of Earths. These […] Continue reading

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Ocean Worlds of Supercritical Fluid

In class, we learned about various categories of exoplanets, including Super-Earths, terrestrials, ice giants, gas giants, and hot Jupiters. One other category that was mentioned was “water worlds,” an ill-defined and not entirely proven category of planets. This category would describe planets that are on the border between terrestrials and ice giants, or terrestrial worlds […] Continue reading

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Earth-like Exoplanet

The super cool story of a discovery of an exoplanet! It’s so cool that an exoplanet look like this! There has been an incredibly interesting and exciting discovery made recently! The James Webb telescope has discovered and photographed an exoplanet and collected data to validate its existence as an exoplanet. An exoplanet is an astronomical […] Continue reading

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TRAPPIST-1e: Another Earth?

Source for Image Circling a red dwarf star 40 light years away is a system of seven, Earth-like planets. All seven planets are similar enough in size to Earth to hold atmosphere and potentially have volcanic activity. However, only one of those is located within the Goldilocks zone. In other words, TRAPPIST-1e has the potential […] Continue reading

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Life Beyond Earth

There have been many recent discoveries that suggest life exists beyond Earth. Some of these include new findings on Enceladus (a small moon of Saturn), exoplanets, and even Mars. Enceladus NASA’s Cassini spacecraft collected data that allowed us to simulate the geochemistry of phosphorus in the ocean. This study helped us reach some interesting conclusions […] Continue reading

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Blog 7 – The Dark Forest Solution to Fermi’s Paradox

Fermi’s paradox is that based on the number of stars in our galaxy and estimates on the likelihood of intelligent, space-faring civilizations to develop in a star system, we should expect to see some signs of alien life in our galaxy. Some possible solutions to the paradox are that Life is more rare than we […] Continue reading

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Astrobiology – Indicators of Life on Other Worlds

Astrobiology studies the past, present, and future of life in the universe. One facet of this interdisciplinary field is considering the possibility of life on other planets or worlds. Scientists utilize research in biology, chemistry, astronomy, and cosmology to help determine if life could exist elsewhere in the universe, and if so, how we can […] Continue reading

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Blog #7: Sara Seager Ted Talk

I watched the 2015 Ted Talk from Sara Seager (of the Seager Equation) called The Search for Planets Beyond our Solar System. She sets out to introduce what we currently know about our solar galaxy and extra solar planets. She presents a few interesting artist conceptions of the various exoplanets we know of (mainly from […] Continue reading

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What if life existed in every solar system?

The Drake equation investigates the likelihood of intelligent, communicating life existing on other worlds in our galaxy. But what if life could easily exist on other worlds, and there was life in every solar system around us? What could this potentially mean for us? First, we must consider the fact that the closest star to […] Continue reading

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Exoplanets

The words in the above picture are hard to make out, but I really liked the visual of some of the known exoplanets graphed on a plot. The color and appearances of these planets are not truly known since we have not directly seen them, but they are inferred based on density, temperature, metal content, […] Continue reading

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