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Planet Hunters:
The Search for Life in Outer Space

Using incredible technological advancements, astronomers are expanding their search for life in the universe. Could they be looking for the right answers in the wrong places?

by Jerold Aust

Astronomer Daniel Goldin philosophized during Hunt for Alien Worlds, a program in the NOVA series aired on many U.S. Public Broadcasting Service stations: "We all search for meaning to life, and if-if we would even have a discovery that there is a habitable planet, let alone life on it-I think it would uplift the human spirit."

The desire to know the meaning of life is a worthy aspiration, and to explore whether life exists somewhere else in the universe is a natural consequence of that desire. Do planets circle distant stars somewhere in another galaxy? Scientists want to know.

The Hale-Bopp comet earlier this year left behind more than a spectacular prismatic spray of cosmic moisture. This celestial chunk of ice stirred imaginations to wonder about other planets-and other life-somewhere in the remote regions of the universe.

Such speculation is aided by today's telescopes. They are so powerful that some believe that the discovery of life on other planets is within reach. It's this kind of technological advantage that raises such expectations.

Historical perspective

The greatest challenge astronomers face in their search for other planets is that they can't see them. The only planets we can directly observe are those we can view in the night sky, such as Mars and Venus, some of those that make up our solar system. Although some nearby planets are visible to the naked eye, those in the farthest orbits of our sun's system took hundreds of years to discover. Uranus wasn't discovered until 1781, Neptune in 1843 and Pluto in 1930 (captured in a telescopic photograph). It wasn't until 1990, with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope, that Pluto's moon was captured in a photograph.

Scientists assume that other solar systems with planets like ours exist and harbor intelligent life.

Read the full article at www.gnmagazine.org/issues/gn14/planethunters.htm


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