In the 1980’s a forty-something Carl Sagan told school
children we’d have proof of planets beyond our own solar system within their
lifetime. Now those children are grown and his prediction has come true. In
March 2009 NASA launched Kepler, a deep space telescope with a mission to to
find Earth-sized planets orbiting distant stars. Kepler has collected tons of
data and sent it back to earth. Earth-bound stargazers, sifting through this
data are finding planets – to date, nearly 4,000. You don’t have to be a rocket
scientist to get in on the act. In fact, an auto mechanic in Australia just
discovered a star with at least four orbiting planets. NASA expects Kepler will
run out of fuel in the next month or two. But by then a new planet-hunter will
have launched. TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) will search for
evidence of planets among the 200,000 stars nearest our own.
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