Planets are Really Freakin' Awesome

 And I mean "awesome" in the truest sense such that I'm in awe of the vastness of the universe. There are so many planets! Trillions of trillions! The more I learn about them the more realize I don't know about them. There's so much out there! 

As a kid, studying space seemed so easy. Moon's got phases, there's a few planets, asteroids, comets, and whatnot, the Sun is big and hot, and constellations are neat. But then I learned about how we learned about these things--about the robotic explorers that visited the planets and the telescopes we build. Those are cool! How do we make those things? How did we get a car-sized rover to Mars? How did we learn what Saturn's rings are made of? How do we know how far the stars are? And what is the Sun doing that makes it so hot all the time? How do we know about this stuff? For as long as I remember, I've had an interest in learning about how stuff works and why things are the way they are. This naturally led me to cultivate an interest in studying science in school.

I remember latching onto science fiction early while in elementary school, reading stuff like Ender's Game and The Tripods series in 5th and 6th grade. I have my dad to thank for introducing me early to a life-long love of the Star Wars movies, which then grew to reading the books, playing games, and collecting toys. I high school, I thought I'd get into something dealing with scientific research but eventually decided on a teaching degree in physical science. This isn't the story of why I made that decision to be a teacher, but I will share that story another day. Instead, this is the story of how I learned about other planets beyond our solar system.

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So, there I was in my first semester at college taking some the basics in science and and a few electives. One class was an introductory astronomy class. I remember only a few of the lectures because it was held at the end of the day in the dark planetarium with the reclined seats and the PowerPoint projected onto the curved ceiling. I admit I might have dozed off a few times. I do remember one of our projects, which was to research about recent space news and create a presentation we'd show to the class. I don't remember what guided me to it, but I settled on talking about an at-the-time upcoming new telescope about to be launched called the Kepler telescope. I found it fascinating that it would be able to see planets around other stars by just watching the light dim ever so slightly. Later when it launched I followed updates about it, including issues it had with fuel and thrusters that caused its mission targets to change. But despite that, what it found was incredible.

Artist depction of the Kepler Space Telescope. Credit:NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI 

 Before Kepler, we kind of knew that stars had planets but we weren't quite sure on how plentiful they were. We had a few techniques that gave us some indication that some stars had large Jupiter-like planets, but it was only like a few dozen star systems. But as the Kepler data rolled in month after month, year after year, we began to find hundreds and then thousands of stars with planets. As it turns out, not only is the universe pretty good at making trillions of stars but there's trillions upon trillions of planets to go with them. How small that makes Earth seem to think of all the worlds out there circling their own sun. There's got to be another planet with life on it somewhere, right?

Years later and after being a teacher for a while (yet another story for another day why I left teaching for now), I decided to begin another degree in Astronomy & Planetary Science. As of this writing, I'm in my final semester of the program and looking forward to graduation this spring (yay!). Perhaps one of the best experiences I've had while in the APS program was in the fall semester of 2024. I was able to get into a small group course that was working with transit data from a distant exoplanet to write a peer-reviewed paper about the innovative technique used to collect and process the data. I felt like I had come full circle, from learning about the Kepler telescope and the transit method decades ago to now learning how to use Google Colab/Python code to reduce the data and produce a light curve of my own. It was actual evidence of another planet orbiting another star, which nowadays seems so normal. Of course there's planets around other stars. Duh! But don't forget that in about the last fifty years or so we've gone from thinking there's maybe, possibly, could be a decent chance that some stars have planets. Now, you can hardly swing a stick around without hitting a new planetary system. Planets are everywhere!

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Sources:
NASA. (2025, February 11). Kepler / K2. https://science.nasa.gov/mission/kepler/#h-overview