One of Ten Billion Earths: How we Learn about our Planet’s Past and Future from Distant Exoplanets

Illustrated with breath-taking images of the Solar System and of the Universe around it, this book explores how the discoveries within the Solar System and of exoplanets far beyond it come together to understand the habitability of Earth, and how these findings guide the search for exoplanets that could support life. The author highlights how, within two decades of the discovery of the first planets outside the Solar System in the 1990s, scientists concluded that planets are so common that most stars are orbited by them. The lives of exoplanets and their stars, as of our Solar System and its Sun, are inextricably interwoven: stars are the seeds around which planets form, they provide light and warmth for as long as they shine, and at the end of their lives they may destroy their planets even as they release newly forged materials, out of which other planets, including Earth, are made.