News
The light from distant worlds
5 Aug 2024
Is there alien life out there? Astrophysicist Kevin Heng analyzes the tiniest of signatures from the atmosphere of exoplanets to answer one of the biggest questions that exists.
Exoplanets tend to be shy and retiring. When identified in the neighborhood of distant stars – either because they briefly block the light from their home stars as they pass in front of them on their orbits, or because they exert such a pull on the stars that the starlight seems to pulsate – the alien worlds do not reveal all too much about themselves. Astronomers can merely estimate the size, mass, and thus the density of the exoplanets from such observational data, but that is all.