Alien Earths
Lisa Kaltenegger
Allen Lane
£25 • HB
Our planet, Earth, is home to over eight million species of life, sprawling over its continents and swimming within its oceans – some can even be found deep within its rocky crust! In contrast, the surfaces of our neighbouring planets are barren. Sure, it’s possible that life of some kind may be hiding out of sight beneath the dusty soils of Mars or below the icy crusts of some of the outer Solar System moons, but if that’s the case, we have yet to discover it.
We shouldn’t give up hope of finding life elsewhere in the Universe just yet, though. A plethora of telescopes continue to search the sky for planets around other stars – so-called exoplanets. In our Universe there are hundreds of billions of stars in each of the hundreds of billions of galaxies, and exoplanet searches so far suggest most of these stars
