The things we DON'T KNOW about EXOPLANETS

From the creator

The things we don’t know are what drives science forward. A lack of knowledge, of not knowing the answer to a question is what pushes scientists to get more data, or design a new experiment. And in the case of astrophysics, those new experiments are often entirely new observatories, either on the ground or up in space, the design of which is driven by the gaps in our knowledge. So I love it when a paper is published summarising all the things we don’t yet know about a topic, and this month we saw that for exoplanet research. Exoplanets are planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy the Milky Way, we currently know of just under 6000 of them, some being the only planet around a star known, and some being in multiple planet systems just like the solar system. We’ve found everything from hot Jupiters close into their stars, to super-Earths that might be habitable since the first exoplanet was discovered in 1995. In this video I thought it would be fun to go quick fire through the 17 different knowledges gaps, the things we still don’t know, summarised in this paper by Stapelfeldt & Mamajek - to figure out what’s next for exoplanet science, including the search for life out there in the Universe.... Stapelfeldt & Mamajek (2025) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.18665 My previous video on the history of exoplanet research - https://youtu.be/6_bJXZuREOA?si=tnQDDwZMnfssuf3N My previous video on the Habitable Worlds Observatory - https://youtu.be/z2JIkAPcdnU?si=1UMvyk5CwZl65Tl4 My previ

Published 2025-08-28 · Watch on YouTube ↗
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