Advances in the detection of exoplanets.

Yes we can go and see how far our ships - instruments take us, if we had the Enterprise we could go very far and in recent years our instruments are improving so extraordinarily that we are capable of doing things that until very recently were thought impossible.

When the series Cosmos, a personal journey by Carl Sagan, was first broadcast in 1980, it was believed that it was literally impossible to see or detect exoplanets, not that it was thought that they did not exist, at that time they assumed that all stars except special cases of stars very active giants or double systems where the stars are very close together and do not leave room for a planet to exist, in general any normal star would have its planets in a number similar to what we can find in the solar system, but it was believed that it was impossible detect or see them because we could not build observatories powerful enough to capture, for example, the Mini eclipses produced by a planet that passes in front of its star or capture the gravitational pull that a planet exerts on its star.

Currently we can detect planets, we can even "scratch", get very close to knowing if they are habitable or not, I try to be precise because we can first know if it is in the habitable zone, then we can analyze the atmosphere to know if that atmosphere is compatible for life and we can even detect certain gases that are only produced by living beings. For example, we are waiting for further analysis of an exoplanet that is confirmed to be an aquatic world, that is, a world without a solid surface that is basically a global ocean and where a type of gas has been detected that They only produce living beings, but it must be confirmed and it is not easy.

As I often explain to you, the problem with this type of world that is in the habitable zone is that you have to have several observations and many of them take months to pass in front of their star again, imagine a planet like Earth to try to have data about the atmosphere of a planet like Earth, you have to have several observations and you only have one opportunity every 365 days, at the moment when that planet passes in front of its star and we can capture the light that passes through the atmosphere of that exoplanet .

And something important is that to see it the exoplanet has to be in your plane of vision, we detect very few, we assume that the number of planets has to be more or less similar to what we find in the solar system, when we detect an exoplanet Normally it is due to the transit issue, with the mini eclipse when it passes in front of its Star.

The other great way to find exoplanets is through gravity, the gravitational pull, but it works better with large planets that can exert a gravitational pull on the star and then we can detect that the star is Wiggling, even if we don't see the planet, nor Let's look at the mini eclipse, and we know that there has to be something there because it pulls on the star and based on how the star moves we can detect it.

Even though our technology is limited, we only capture a few and it is assumed that in those systems where one exists, there must surely be more, you just have to search.

For example, in Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the solar system, 4.2 light years away, we know that one already exists, and another one that they are trying to confirm, but I personally believe that if there is one, there should be many more, no. hundreds obviously but I think that in the near future there could surely be six more planets that we cannot detect, perhaps because they are very small or perhaps because it orbits very far from the star and therefore they do not pass in front of it, that is why our limitations are still many but is that our teams are improving.

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