WASHINGTON: The University of Washington is joining with NASA and 11 other universities and research institutions to create a team to find life on other planets.
Twenty years ago, astronomers discovered the first possible planet outside of our own solar system by detecting the slight and repeated dimming of a star’s light as that planet passed in front of the star as it orbited. Now, thousands of planets have been detected, and some are estimated to be about the size of earth and live in the so-called habitable zone that could support water and life without being too close or too far away from the host star.
“I think it’s highly unlikely that we are the only life forms in this galaxy,” said Victoria Meadows, a professor of Astronomy at the University of Washington and principal investigator for the Virtual Planetary Laboratory, which is part of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute.
The focus is on so called exoplanets, meaning planets that are circling other stars outside of our own solar system. The UW will pair up with other universities including the University of California, University of Maryland, University of Arizona, University of Nebraska, University of Wyoming, Arizona State University, Stanford University, Yale University and Hampton University. NASA Ames Research Center and the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology and NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies the research institutions on the team. The name for the cooperative effort is called the Nexus for Exoplanet System Science or NExSS.
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