A New Approach may find Exoplanets even more habitable than Earth

The theory of us being unique in Cosmos might soon get challenged

The search for exoplanets has been going for almost three decades — The breakthrough came in 1992 when radio astronomers Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail announced the discovery of two planets orbiting the pulsar PSR 1257+12. Over the years we have taken huge strides in refining the process to explore exoplanets and at the last count, the number of such discoveries stood at 4,043.

Unfortunately, all these discoveries have led to rocky, barren landscapes with deadly eruptions. Nothing that comes close to what we have where on our beautiful blue planet. Even with the most advanced telescopes, we are only able to conclude that these exoplanets are in the ‘Goldilocks zone’ — the planet is just the right distance from its star to have the temperatures where water can exist in liquid form & hopefully host alien life.

But according to new research, there could be different types of exoplanets out there where life can thrive even more than here on Earth. A geophysicist Stephanie Olson from the University of Chicago & her team have developed a computer modeling software called ROCKE-3D. The software has the capability to model rocky exoplanets.