The Planet Factory: Exoplanets and the Search for a Second Earth
Elizabeth Tasker
Twenty years ago, the search for planets - and life - outside the solar system was the lot of science fiction writers. Today it is one of the most dynamically developing areas of astronomical science, and the number of discovered exoplanets is already in the thousands. The discovery of these worlds has become possible only in the last decade. The year 2016 was especially fruitful, which was largely facilitated by the active work of the Kepler space telescope. These new worlds are nothing like writers' fantasies - planets larger than Jupiter with a year of only one week, planets orbiting the remains of dead stars, planets with two suns in the sky, and planets without a sun at all. Somewhere far away there are worlds the size of the Earth, on one half of which it is always day, and on the other - eternal night, water worlds, the entire surface of which is hidden under the thickness of the oceans, and lava worlds, spewing seas of magma. Planet Factory is a story about exoplanets, that is, planets orbiting stars outside of our solar system.
