Exoplanet Exploration: What is an Exoplanet #1
Hello, StemGeeks! it's been a while i know. I wanted to create this post, weeks earlier but i had and still have a lot of reading to do in my "real life". I also write one post per day in LeoFinance while i also try to comment a bit, thus my time is a bit limited compared to before.
Anyway, as I have stayed only 23 days ago in my first intro post of this new series i will mainly talk about exoplanets and astronomy in general. The first thing we need to do is to actually understand what an Exoplanet is, and then slowly and steadily move forward, except if we find a black hole!
What is an Exoplanet
We all know, at least i hope so that all of the planets in our solar system orbit around the Sun. The Sun plays a huge role along with other factors ofc to why there is life here on Earth. Then the scientists wondered... How cool is filotasriza3?
They also wondered while knowing that there are tons of planets and stars out there, why not some of these planets be similar to ours. Thus the exploration of exoplanets started. An exoplanet, in short, is a planet outside of our solar system that orbits around a star. Simple right?
Now something interesting, at least for me, is that the majority of the exoplanets that have been discovered are in the Milky way and the reason as to why is because this is as far as our telescopes can see, so imagine the possibilities.
What we are Actually Searching & Checking
Once again briefly, they try to find planets similar to Earth for 3 main reasons. The first one is in order to find other habitant planets for us humans in order to go there live, secondly, we try to find other planets similar to Earth that may already have life and last but not least we try to understand better the universe.
So the scientists when they discover an exoplanet they are checking its size and elements in order to categorize them, something that we gonna talk about in another post. The same applies to the methods used to identify and discover the planets because there isn't only one i dare to say.
As of now the scientists have found in total 4341 exoplanets and according to them that's nothing, they expect to find tens of thousands in the next decade or so. The first ones discovered in 1992 and the interesting thing is that they couldn't sustain life because their star was dead and was constantly emitting radiation to these planets!
A Few Last Words
I hope you learned something new today and to be honest with you i am extremely excited about these people's work. They can actually discover life, other planets that our next generation can live and many more things that we may not even be aware of now.
Posted with STEMGeeks