Exoplanet Puns

There are some exoplanets that we could possibly live on, but which one is the best?

There are about 200 billion planets in the Milky Way Galaxy; we've discovered about 4,000 of them. The variety of those mere 4,000 is so damn interesting to me. I can't even imagine the discoveries that lay in store for us.

Edit: I think a planet with a "water cycle" that instead of actual water, it's liquid uranium or something similar would be really cool to study.

I just learned in physics that apparently whenever you look anywhere in the universe, you’re basically looking millions of years back into the past because that’s how long it takes like to reach. My question is if that’s the case, why are people searching for aliens and exoplanets when the things we’re observing could be completely different in real time? It’s like if an alien built a telescope today and saw earth, they could be seeing the ice age or a time when earth was uninhabitable. Wouldn’t that be true for other exoplanets? I mean if we had to abandon earth soon and saw a habitable planet, wouldn’t that be a big if? What if it’s uninhabitable and all it’s oceans evaporated? How do we know that a planet is habitable in present time and is there some sort of calculation to predict if it will be habitable in real time?

I hope its ok to ask amateur questions here, sorry if this is a bit basic but these questions have been flying around in my head for some time now.

First, how sure are we that we've found all the visible stars out to 40Ly?

If I was to answer that myself with a guess I would say it must be at least 99.99% by now so that begs the next question.

How likely is it we've already found all exoplanets (greater than say, 0.5x earth size) of these stars, out to 40Ly?

I don't know enough about the resolution or coverage or expectations of our current scopes (tess, cheops etc) or how well catalogued our local space is to even start to answer this myself. Thanks in advance for any help with my trivial curiosity.

Hey all!

I'm working on the worldbuilding for my sci-fi setting and I would love to be able to make a 3D map of inhabited space, stretches to around 100 light-years at its farthest. I've been doing a lot of resources on potentially habitable exoplanets IRL for this project, and the data on the distances from those planets to Earth is widely available. However, I have yet to find information regarding where these planets are located, not just how far away they are. If any of y'all know of a way to attain this data, I'd love to hear it. Thanks in advance! :))

Hey all!

I'm incorporating TRAPPIST-1 e into the worldbuilding for my sci-fi setting and I was wondering what the effects would be of a year lasting a week and a day lasting 1/4 of a year on Earth. The atmospheric content is very similar to Earth and so is the gravity, but I don't know what I want the axial tilt to be yet. My setting is hard sci fi, so I'd like to make the composition of my inhabited exoplanets to be as realistic as possible. That being said, I know that it is often the case with exoplanets that one has to do a lot of speculating as to the true nature of these distant celestial bodies (which is to say, fill in the gaps). This presents a unique opportunity though: the ability to pick and choose the unknown attributes of TRAPPIST-1 e to create some really interesting worldbuilding. I'd love to hear any advice/first thoughts you guys have.

Thanks so much! :)

The idea of analyzing the atmospheres to look for signs of alien life is the most exciting part of the JWST mission for me. Does anyone know what exoplanets they plan to look at?

What're your favorite exoplanets so far?

Hi friends, I'm curious whether there are any theoretical limits on the observation of exoplanets using telescopes.

Presumably, at least in theory, you can just keep building larger and larger telescopes to see fainter and fainter objects in more detail, right?

Engineering and cost constraints aside, could we build gigantic telescopes (like the size of a moon) that could see exoplanets in the same detail as we see our own Earth?

Hello everyone, my 7th graders and I are working through a unit on ecology covering producers, consumers, decomposers, etc. To conclude the unit, I am planning to do a project with them where they create a food web on an alien planet. Does anyone here know of a website that has basic facts/descriptions of real-life exoplanets I could use for my students?

Suppose in the next century we study exoplanet spectral signatures and discover a great abundance of evidence that life is ubiquitous across the universe.

What comes next? What are the next sets of questions we can probe? What specifics on the nature of these life forms can potentially be ascertained through still more precise spectral analysis or other sorts of studies?

Thanks.