Ex-NASA Scientist Lisa Kaltenegger's Explores Extraterrestrial Life In Her New Book, Alien Earths

Astrophysicist Lisa Kaltenegger, who used to work at NASA, has been studying space for her new book called Alien Earths. In the book, she suggests that there could be alien life on a planet mostly covered in water, where creatures like octopuses rule the seas. She also talks about another planet where one side is always dark because it never faces the sun and another planet where it rains molten rocks. After all, the surface is made of lava.

The scientist looked into lots of exoplanets, which are planets circling stars outside our solar system. Some of these planets are somewhat like Earth, or they could be good places for life to exist.

In a report from the Daily Mail, Dr Lisa Kaltenegger, a former NASA scientist, shared insights from her book titled The World that Shook Science. She mentioned that we discovered the first exoplanet back in 1992. Since then, we’ve found over 5000 exoplanets. Among them, around 70 might have conditions suitable for life. However, some of these planets are incredibly far away, up to 17,000 light years. To give you an idea, even the fastest man-made rocket would take 6.9 million years to reach them. Despite these discoveries, spotting aliens on such distant planets isn’t just difficult but downright impossible.

Dr Lisa mentioned that finding aliens is tough. They could be right in front of us and we wouldn’t even realise it. However, the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico says there are 29 exoplanets where life could exist, similar to Earth. But there’s a special place called Proxima Centauri, just 4.25 light years away, where aliens might hang out. At this spot, the sun never sets or rises, making it a potentially awesome place to live.

In another part of the galaxy, there’s a candidate exoplanet called CoRoT-7 b. It’s a whopping 489 lightyears away from Earth and it’s constantly dripping hot lava. From a human perspective, it sounds like a pretty rough place to be, with almost no chance for life. But hey, aliens might still call it home. There’s also a chance for life around the orange dwarf star Kepler-62. This exoplanet is approximately 980 light-years away from our solar system.