Cool Worlds

September 24, 2019 12:27 PM

Astronomy, exoplanets, astroengineering, the search for extraterrestrial life & intelligence, futurism and interstellar travel.

The Cool Worlds Lab (http://coolworlds.astro.columbia.edu), based at the Department of Astronomy, Columbia University, is a team of astronomers seeking to discover and understand alien worlds, particularly those where temperatures are cool enough for life, led by Professor David Kipping. Content is primarily written, produced and presented by David Kipping, but regularly features his students and visitors as guest presenters.

The channel has many more interesting videos, but my favorite one is probably A Journey to the End of the Universe, which answers the age old question "what if we just got in a rocket and left?"

posted by surlyben (7 comments total)

The techniques they use to deduce the existence and nature of exoplanets are just so satisfyingly clever. NASA has a page with some real nice animations explaining some of them.
posted by straight at 4:10 PM on September 24, 2019

Thanks for this!
posted by eggkeeper at 5:26 PM on September 24, 2019

The other day I blew my daughter's mind a tiny bit by explaining to her that when I was her age we did not actually know if there were any exoplanets at all, when we today have confirmation of over 4,000.
posted by Harald74 at 1:17 AM on September 25, 2019 [3 favorites]

You just blew my mind! Was it a big deal for the public when they started being confirmed?
posted by gaybobbie at 6:01 AM on September 25, 2019

That Journey video is simultaneously exciting and melancholy in the best way possible.
posted by mittens at 10:39 AM on September 25, 2019 [1 favorite]

In 1992? Yeah, kind of.

I feel old.
posted by Naberius at 10:39 AM on September 25, 2019

I remember the first confirmation as being something of a milestone, but I was (am) a bit of a nerd, so I don't know how the general public reacted.
posted by Harald74 at 11:40 AM on September 27, 2019