Holly Henry

Searching for Earth 2.0 among the Wild Geographies of Exoplanets

Abstract

Discoveries of ever enticing exoplanets appear nearly daily in headline news. In January 2015 alone, three such discoveries are opening new vistas for astrobiology. Researchers at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands and the University of Rochester reported new discoveries regarding exoplanet J1407b, which ranges in size between 10 to 40 Jupiter masses and has a vast ring system 200 times larger than that of Saturn. New modeling of the ring system reveals it is divided into at least 30 rings, 120 million kilometers in diameter. Detected gaps between the rings suggest exomoons orbit this massive exoplanet, the first ringed world discovered outside our Solar System.

The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics confirmed eight more rocky worlds believed to orbit in the habitable zone of their stars. The most Earth-sized are Kepler-438b, an exoplanet only 12 percent larger than Earth, that apparently basks in 40 percent more light, and Kepler-442b, roughly one-third larger than Earth, and which receives two-thirds as much light.

Perhaps most intriguing is the 11.2 billion-year-old-star system announced in The Astrophysical Journal. Kepler-444 hosts five planets, ranging in size between Mercury and Venus. Though the planets apparently are not in the habitable zone, the age of this star system suggests that conditions for life likely existed very early in the history of our universe. The proposed slide-presentation and talk will explore the wild geographies emerging in our discovery of exoplanets and what those reveal about the search for life in the universe.

Biography

Holly Henry is Professor of English at California State University, San Bernardino. She is co-author, with astronomer Chris Impey, of Dreams of Other Worlds: The Amazing Story of Unmanned Space Exploration (Princeton UP 2013), which was awarded the Eugene M. Emme Astronautical Literature Award by the American Astronautical Society for the best book in the history of Astronautics in 2013. The award celebrates the work of Eugene Emme, the first NASA historian.