“Historically, our assumption has been that the region around Jupiter is fairly empty, cleaned out by the giant planet’s gravity, but our results teach us that there is a region that is constantly being fed,” said Kathryn Volk at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in 2019 about a constant source of new objects that may help explain the surprising rate of icy body impacts with Jupiter, such as the Shoemaker-Levy 9 event in 1994 when over twenty fragments of comet that collided with Jupiter were observed by astronomers at hundreds of observatories around the world.
“Somewhere, on some other planet orbiting some very distant star, maybe in another galaxy, there could well be entities that are at least as intelligent as we are, and are interested in science. It is not impossible,” says Nobel-Prize laureate, physicist Murray Gell-Mann. “I think there probably are lots. Very likely none is close enough to interact with us, but they could be out there very easily.”
It’s been suggested by astrobiologists and science-fiction authors that there may be evolutionary parallels to Earth on distant worlds because creation tends to be economical, but never, CHEOPS mission data reveals, on the most extreme planet known in the universe –an alien world 20 times closer to its host star than Earth is to the Sun, a star so hot –more than 2000 degrees Celsius hotter than our sun–it appears blue and not yellow-white.
“In less than a hundred years, we have found a new way to think of ourselves,” observed Stephen Hawking. “From sitting at the center of the universe, we now find ourselves orbiting an average-sized sun, which is just one of billions of stars in our own Milky Way galaxy.” And now, a short-lived eclipse of an extremely bright x-ray source 23 million lightyears from Earth in the Whirlpool Galaxy, illuminated a world about the size of Saturn orbiting a binary star system –a stellar remnant, either a neutron star or black hole, and a massive star–further underscoring our cosmic insignificance.
“This planet is roughly the size of Jupiter, but it also has a very short orbital period — a year on this planet is only 1.4 days, so it’s quickly whipping around its white dwarf star,” said Ian Crossfield, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at University of Kansas about the first-ever discovery of a planet, WD 1856 b, orbiting a white dwarf vestige of a star, like our Sun, that has ballooned into a red giant then collapsed back into a dense, dim core that’s often about the size of Earth.
