Is a Planet in the Goldlock Zone a Habitable Planet?

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The idea is that you also need the conditions for liquid water to exist on the surface of a planet for it to be habitable. And an obvious question to ask is, are there ways of gathering data about all these five thousand planets we've found that would indicate whether any of them had life on them? Oh, that is tricky. In principle, you could and a and we're going tostart, maybe testing that notion.

Recent years have seen a revolution in the study of exoplanets, planets that orbit stars other than the Sun (or don’t orbit stars at all). After a few tentative detections in the 1990s, dedicated instruments in the 2000s have now pushed the number of known exoplanets into the thousands, enough to begin to categorize their distribution and properties. Today’s guest is John Asher Johnson, one of the leaders in this field. We talk about the various different ways that exoplanets can be detected, what we know about them know, and what might happen in the future.

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John Asher Johnson received his Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently professor of astronomy at Harvard University. He is the founder and director of the Banneker Institute for summer undergraduate research. Among his awards are the Newton Lacy Pierce Prize from the American Astronomical Society. He is the author of How Do You Find an Exoplanet?

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