7 Exoplanets and Unlimited Hype
Sometimes news in the astronomy world boggles my mind. When Curiosity landed for the first time, literally an advanced car with an extremely sophisticated landing system on another planet, perhaps one of the greatest space accomplishments in my lifetime, it seemed to be somewhat ignored. When we visited Vesta, the second largest asteroid in the asteroid belt it went completely ignored. Even when we visited a comet with a lander in tow, the only reason anyone talked about it was because of cute videos that ESA put out.
All of these events, are in my opinion, magnitudes greater in the world of astronomy than the discovery of these 7 new exoplanets. Yet the exoplanet discovery was on every major news site, upvoted on Reddit, and even Google made a special logo in celebration. You would have thought we landed on The Moon or Mars.
So how important are these 7 exoplanets? Well consider you went to a fast food restaurant and your buddy started jumping up and down because he/she saw 7 people of similar height and 3 of them happened to be sitting at the same table which happened to be the table you sat at last time you were in that restaurant. The same way you would look at your buddy and be like “uhhh, not exactly that exciting…” is exactly how I see this news.
This analogy holds because:
- We discover exoplanets ALL THE TIME, there are so many of them now. Literally thousands. Just like we see A LOT of people all the time.
- The list of potentially habitable exoplanets numbers in the dozens, just like the number of people of a certain height and sitting at that specific table numbers in the many dozens. Where height is their size and the table is the Goldilocks zone, a certain distance from the sun where water can exist.
It is not surprising at all that there are “potentially habitable” exoplanets. The definition of potentially habitable planet just means it happens to be a certain distance from its star where liquid water could exist, it doesn’t even mean it does exist!
This means a habitable planet might just be a rock in space like The Moon. I would not call the Moon habitable, yet by these definitions it would be a potentially habitable body. Mars would definitely classify as “potentially habitable” planet by the way, and so would Venus. Venus! A planet that literally rains acid, is lead melting hot and has an atmosphere so thick it would crush you like a tin can.
I don’t mean this all to sound negative, I love news coverage of space stuff. But there is something really weird about having seen some pretty amazing astronomy stuff and having no one know what I am talking about, and then being bombarded and even made fun of by not knowing about more exoplanets being discovered by people who are just reading click-bait headings at face value. Again to iterate one final time: these are just 7 rocks floating in space so far as we know, and three of them happen to fall within a certain distance from their star.
