Planets Near and Far

Join Garrett Levine, a PhD candidate in astronomy at Yale, for a presentation on exoplanets and the search for other Earth-like planets in our galaxy.

Humans have studied planets in our solar system, including our own Earth, for centuries. Only in the mid-1990s, however, did astronomers first find planets that orbit stars other than the Sun. In the thirty years since that monumental discovery, over 5000 additional planets have been discovered. Perhaps surprisingly, very few of these "exoplanets" resemble anything like the familiar ones in our solar system.