This Space Telescope Will Search For Life On Distant Planets

It was one of humanity’s greater vanities that we ever questioned whether there are any planets in the universe beyond the eight in our little solar system. Our sun is a perfectly ordinary star, residing in a perfectly ordinary galaxy, out in the suburban fringes of one of the Milky Way’s spiral arms. There are more than 100 billion other stars in the galaxy and, in turn, up to two trillion galaxies in the universe. The physics are the same everywhere, and if our solar system could spin up planets out of the leftover dust and gas that formed the sun, others should be able to do the same.

Still, science being science, we needed proof—and we got it in 1992 , when two astronomers found two planets orbiting a pulsar 2,300 light years from Earth. Since then, over 6,000 confirmed exopl