As time has gone by and new techniques for spotting planets beyond the boundaries of our solar system have advanced, the amount of such “exoplanets” that we’ve found has risen at a staggering pace—to the point that we’ve gotten kind of desensitized to it. That’s what makes this new announcement from NASA so exciting; they’ve made an exoplanet discovery worth its own press event.
The even better news—until we have the actual news that tomorrow’s event will bring—is that the content of tomorrow’s press conference is also set to appear in Nature, so it’s at least been subject to some amount of vetting in the peer review process. We all remember what happened with the press conference to announce the discovery of gravitational waves from the dawn of the Universe that then turned out not to be true, although separate gravitational waves have since been discovered … right?
Anyway, this announcement is planned for tomorrow at 1PM EST (NASA TV stream embedded above), with curious viewers encouraged to ask questions on Twitter (#askNASA) and a Reddit AMA to follow at 3PM. It’s hard to say what they’ve discovered (though our minds always jump to aliens first and then dial back expectations from there), but one thing that would be a big deal is strong evidence of potential habitability, which is hard to judge at such great distances. Or it could just be a load of newly discovered planets. Only one way to find out!
(via Engadget, image via Hubble ESA on Flickr)
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