Free Astronomy Magazine November-December 2019

EXOPLANETS 39 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2019 T he search for Earth-like planets has been a significant theme in astronomy for several years now, and will become increasingly dominant in the near future. Perhaps it is not too far-fetched to imagine that, in a few decades, astronomy research will be divided into two major sectors: plan- etology on one side and “all the rest” on the other. Something similar already happened in the 70s-80s, when the exploration of the planets of our own Solar System stole the show from all the other branches of astron- omy, the latter limited by instruments much more akin to those of forty years prior than those of forty years later. At that time, sci- entists could only speculate on the existence of planets around other stars. Today, we know that there are certainly thousands of A hypothetical superhabit- able world could be an Earth-sized moon orbiting a gas giant, a sce- nario like the one depicted here.