Earth 2.0: the hunt for places like home

Katie Peek, contributor

Exoplanets are the new kids on the block, but in Mirror Earth, Michael Lemonick is impressed by heartbreaking tales of careers shattered by the search

TWO decades ago, Earth was a lonely place. Our solar system was, for all we knew, the only one in the universe. In 1995, the first planet beyond our sun popped into view around the star 51 Pegasi, and a new field of astrophysics burst into life.

Since then our tally of exoplanets has grown to nearly 3000, many found by the Kepler spacecraft launched in 2009. Yet, despite this impressive rate of discovery, few people even know that Earth-like planets exist around other stars, a fact that amazed me as a graduate student planet hunter at the University of California in Berkeley.

In Mirror Earth, science writer Michael Lemonick recounts the story of exoplanet discovery. He begins when planet hunting was something few researchers were willing to risk their careers on. The tale grows as the field does - those early characters become old friends, and new ones join the fray.

His tales portray the capricious nature of scientific discovery. Time and again, we learn of a discovery - the first hot Jupiter that orbits close to its parent star, the first planet that crosses its star's face - only to meet an astronomer who realised too late that they'd had the vital data sitting on a disc somewhere, for months or even years, unanalysed. These heartbreaking stories of scientists who came so close provide a good lesson: extraordinary claims may require extraordinary evidence, but sometimes that evidence shows up unexpectedly easily.

During this journey of discovery, Lemonick adeptly gives us all the physics we need to keep up with, and be amazed by, the discoveries. Many of his metaphors, such as comparing the spectrum of wavelengths of light with the high to low pitch range of keys on a piano, feel fresh. He is unabashed by more complicated, nuanced science, too, preparing the way for the most complex astrophysics by building more complex explanations as the chapters progress. By the time we reach the end, we understand not only these phenomena, but also their significance in the overall picture of hunting for another Earth.

The story veers into name-dropping a little, but the overall effect shows how quickly exoplanets have grown into a robust subfield of astrophyics. It is a fascinating journey, and at the end of Mirror Earth, the reader is ready to be inspired by what the planet hunters will discover next. Most importantly, though, Lemonick has elegantly and convincingly captured the magnitude of the discoveries that have happened in our lifetimes.

Katie Peek is an astrophysicist and infographics designer at Popular Science

Book information
Mirror Earth: The search for our planet's twin by Michael Lemonick
Walker & Co
?19.99/$26

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