“Are we alone?” that uniquely human question, has deep roots within us all, likely beginning as soon as we looked up at the night sky and wondered. The broad reach and general appeal of exoplanet research stems from a long fascination we have for the night sky. But other fields of study, such as philosophy and religion are involved as well. Science is an obvious area of interest where exoplanets have become the poster child for multi-disciplinary collaborative science, encompassing astronomy, astrobiology, biology, astrophysics, geology, and planetary science to name the major players. The stature of this research area was recently highlighted via the 2019 Nobel prize being awarded to exoplanet researchers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz 1.Įxoplanet exploration is truly a world-wide phenomena, a topic of conversation and study in many scholarly areas and at many levels. Starting about 25 years ago, with the discovery of small planets orbiting a pulsar ( Wolszczan and Frail, 1992) and soon thereafter the seminal discovery of 51 Peg b ( Mayor and Queloz, 1995), exoplanet research today spans many scientific disciplines. The start of the Exoplanet section of Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences comes at an opportune time in the history of this fledgling field.
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