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NASA captured international attention earlier this week after it held a media briefing on the complete catalogue of exoplanets discovered by the Kepler Mission. The most interesting of the catalogue’s 4,034 planets are the so-called super Earths, which are both the most common discovery by the mission as well as worlds that we have no analogue for in the Solar System.
Elizabeth Tasker explains why the Kepler Mission catalogue is just the first step – now that we know where to look and that all kinds of worlds are possible, we can begin to unravel what the new planets are like.
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Earth and Super-Earth in an artist concept contrasts our Earth with the planet known as 55 Cancri e.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC)/flickr
Elizabeth Tasker, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)
NASA's Kepler Mission has identified thousands of exoplanets but leaves a lot of questions about alien worlds.
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Arts + Culture
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Christian-Georges Schwentzel, Université de Lorraine
Mummies are scary but they also fascinate us, giving us the feeling that we can vanquish time by preserving our most perishable feature: flesh.
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Thaddeus Metz, University of Johannesburg
Sometimes people like poetic justice because the law is not in a position to mete out what is deserved.
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Business + Economy
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Afroz Alam, Maulana Azad National Urdu University
A crackdown on the beef and leather trades has put hundreds of thousands of Indian Muslims and Dalits out of work, vexing already-tense religious relations and hurting India's economy.
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Politics + Society
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Benjamin H. Bradlow, Brown University
South Africa's democracy is in trouble. But the challenge is less about who should control state institutions, and more about how they can be refashioned to deliver to the poor.
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