Somewhere, at some point in the history of our Universe, life arose. We’re evidence of that here on Earth, but many big puzzles remain.
Here in our own cosmic backyard, we’ve uncovered a tremendous amount of information about the Universe, discovering many fantastic facts and properties about reality that our long-ago ancestors could scarcely fathom. We now know that planets form in a wide variety of masses and sizes, from sub-Mercury sized planets all the way up to super-Jupiters, with smaller planets being more common (but harder to detect) than their more massive counterparts. Planets can form at all distances from all different types of stars, with rocky planets being quite common around nearly all types of stars.
However, many generations of stars needed to form, live, and die previously to make the formation of rocky planets possible, as the Universe started off with only hydrogen and helium as raw ingredients, but rocky planets are primarily composed of heavier elements: the elements forged inside stars themselves. As we close in on 6000 confirmed exoplanets, and as astronomers and astrophysicists prepare to design and build the first space telescope capable of directly imaging Earth-sized planets at Earth-like distances around…
