Wondering about exoplanets.

I wonder about almost anything but our universe is near the top of my list if not at the top.  There are so many unimaginable things going on out there.  Today, I am going to touch on exoplanets.  The definition of an exoplnet is one that is not in our solar system.  And guess what, there are a lot of them!!  So far, astronomers have found nearly 1,000 of them.  It seems that most stars out there have some kind of stuff around them.  It could be just dust that is not thick enough to coalesce or hasn't had the time needed to do so.  It is rare in deed to find a star without something orbiting around it.

Want to see some exoplanets?  If any are visible they would be very small dots and the glare of their sun would make it as hard to see as "a firefly next to a search light".  Most have been detected from the wobble they give to their parent star as they orbit it.  So, the next best thing is artists renditions of what the planet would look like.  So here are a couple of examples.  This first one is of Kepler 35 which is a binary star system with planets.

  Yes, there are systems that have multiple stars and in some, the planet or planets orbit around both stars and in some rare cases the planet may orbit around just one of them.

But the most common are systems similar to our own.  Some have multiple planets and some seem to have only one.  The picture below is another artist's rendition of what a typical exoplanet system would look like.

Out of millions and billions and. . .  a lot of star systems out there, there has to be some planets just like earth.  Astronomers have found a lot of possible places where life as we know it could exist, but the huge question is, "does it?".  I hope I have given you all something to wonder about today.  It is Friday, you know, so have a great TGIF day, you hear?