As reported in Astronomy Now, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite has now identified more than 5,000 possible exoplanet candidates – TESS Objects of Interest, or TOIs.
Exoplanets
At Big Think: 5 ways the James Webb Space Telescope could change science forever
Ethan Siegel: Thanks to its unique, unprecedented capabilities, JWST might answer five currently open questions about the Universe in very surprising ways.
At Mind Matters News: Among 5000 known exoplanets, there are some really strange ones
To sum up, whatever we see or read about planets in science fiction, something out there is likely stranger still. It will be most interesting to see how many of the more conventional exoplanets have life and if there is in fact a reliable formula for predicting it. Those who claim that Earth is just an ordinary planet are certainly wrong — but is Earth unique? The universe is fine-tuned, as is Earth, and that would be an argument for life on exoplanets.
At Mind Matters News: Former astronaut names planet he thinks most likely to have life
Chris Hadfield points to Kepler-442b as Earth-like but some researchers defend the possibility of life even on tidally locked planets, in “edge” zones.
At Mind Matters News, some fun: Recent science papers support science fiction premises
Of course, science can deal only in fact but many of the facts scientists are unearthing can support science fiction premises.
Researchers: Moons make planets habitable — but not all planets can have them
University of Rochester: The researchers found that rocky planets larger than six times the mass of Earth (6M) and icy planets larger than one Earth mass (1M) produce fully—rather than partially—vaporized disks, and these fully-vaporized disks are not capable of forming fractionally large moons.
An exotic exoplanet we might want to view up close through a telescope but not visit
At Phys.org: One particularly interesting substance the team found is a gas containing titanium: titanium oxide. While titanium oxide is very scarce on Earth, it could play an important role in the atmosphere of WASP-189b.
Here’s a new one for coffee hour: Rogue planets
At ScienceDaily: Rogue planets are elusive cosmic objects that have masses comparable to those of the planets in our Solar System but do not orbit a star, instead roaming freely on their own.
Rocky exoplanets turn out to feature exotic rocks
At ScienceDaily: “While some exoplanets that once orbited polluted white dwarfs appear similar to Earth, most have rock types that are exotic to our Solar System,” said Xu. “They have no direct counterparts in the Solar System.”
Three hundred new exoplanets found
Researchers: Studying such a large new group of bodies could help scientists better understand how planets form and orbits evolve, and it could provide new insights about how unusual our solar system is.
At Mind Matters News: Exoplanets: The same laws of physics means similar life forms
Even on Earth, life forms of widely differing ancestry, arrive at the same solutions to physics problems, leading scientists note. On Simon Conway Morris’s view, life forms that fly on exoplanets will do what birds, bats, and insects do here, they say. Intelligent species may even look roughly like us.
Here’s more on Canceled prof Dorian Abbot’s talk on climate and exoplanets — Thursday
Abbot: “Whether a planet could be habitable is determined primarily by the planet’s climate. This lecture will address insights we’ve gained from studying Earth’s climate and how those have been used to make predictions about which exoplanets might be habitable, and how astronomical observations indicate the possibility of new climatic regimes not found on modern Earth…” [The Woke are, of course, welcome to scream, assault passersby, and torch cars and buildings in the comfort of their own Zoom meeting at the same time.]
Theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser: The “Copernican Principle” isn’t science…
We’ve only begun to point huge telescopes at exoplanets. There are too many unknowns to be sure of our status, he thinks.
Expert in exoplanets gets the better of Outrage, Inc.
One thing that’s coming out of all these stories is that those who do NOT cower and mumble abject apologies to the gleefully unlettered tend to do better. Mobs have only the authority they seize from cowards. And who wants to defend an abject coward? He’ll sell you out too. A person who takes a stand can be defended.
Christian Scientific Society webinar May 29: Topic is space aliens
The title is “Is there intelligent life in outer space? What are the stakes?”