Unveiling the Nature of Faraway Worlds

Since the dawn of time, humankind has been amazed by the mystery of the night. A countless number of stars illuminated the clear nights of all the civilisations that populated our World.

This immutable beauty was complemented by five dancing stars in the sky. Ancient Greeks called those moving stars planets, which means wanderers. Planets were entities of unknown nature, but of great interest for all cultures. Their dance around our World should tell us something about the Universe we live in.

Later in time, observations driven by curiosity showed that the planets' motion in the sky is complex. Yet, they follow irregular patterns, an encrypted choreography. The decoding of this motion taught us that planets move around the Sun. And something more important, our World also revolves around the Sun, our World is a planet. This realisation unveiled the true nature of those dancing stars: planets are worlds.

When we learned about the existence of other worlds, we changed our perception of our place in the Universe. By unveiling their nature we will know if we are a common manifestation of nature, or, if we are just a serendipitous instant in the Cosmos.

We are now living in a fascinating era in which we know that other Suns are the centres of concentric systems of many worlds. Planets are ubiquitous in the Galaxy and – we can safely assume – in the Universe. The most exiting thing is that science of planets orbiting faraway stars (also called exoplanets) is still at the beginning of its era. Future exoplanet discoveries will remember us that there are faraway worlds waiting to be unveiled. One by one, these discoveries will contribute to the legacy of curiosity, the main distinctive quality of humankind.

Text extracted and slightly modified from Unveiling the Nature of Faraway Worlds: Intensive characterisation of K2 transiting exoplanets, Barragán O., 2018, PhD Thesis, Unversità di Torino.