Exoplanets Research Paper

An exoplanet is described as a planet that orbits a star outside our solar system. The majority of the exoplanets scientists have discovered were found in the past two decades, mainly with the Kepler space telescope. These planets are all different in orbit, size, and type. Some are smaller than Jupiter, or even larger than Jupiter, but essentially all of the exoplanets that we know of a larger than the Earth. Scientists have even found planets that orbit two stars, as opposed to the normal one. But the search for exoplanets is for one specific reason: to find an Earth-like planet that is habitable for humans. Scientists have been theorising about exoplanets for hundreds of years, but their existence wasn’t confirmed until the 1990s, which is pretty recent. Most of the early exoplanets were discovered by the MOST …show more content…
We have found many smaller planets in the habitable zone, but the more notable ones are the planets that have helped us learn more about how planets form and evolve. The first of the five most important exoplanets in 51 Pegasi b, which, as mentioned earlier, was one of the first exoplanets to be confirmed and is half the mass of Jupiter with an orbit so close to its sun that it is tidally locked. HD 209458 b was the first planet found to transit its star and was the first planet outside of the solar system where we could determine the characteristics of its atmosphere. 55 Cancri e is a super Earth that orbits a star which is bright enough that we can examine it in much more detail than other exoplanets and may be “carbon-rich with a diamond core”. HD 80606 b held the record in 2001 for “most eccentric exoplanet ever discovered”, and its strange orbit may be because of another star interfering. WASP-33 b has a stratosphere, much like the Earth, which absorbs some of the visible and UV light from its star and also orbits its star