About this item
After decades of painstaking planning, NASA's first dedicated exoplanet detection mission, the Kepler space telescope, was launched in 2009 from Cape Canaveral. Kepler began a years-long mission of looking for Earth-like planets amongst the millions of stars in the northern constellations of Lyra and Cygnus. Kepler's successful launch meant that it was only a matter of time before we would know just how many Earth-like planets exist in our galaxy. A revolution in thinking about our place in the universe was about to occur, depending on what Kepler found. Are earths commonplace or rare? Are we likely to be alone in the universe? Only Kepler could start to answer these vexing questions. Universal Life provides a unique viewpoint on the epochal events of the last two decades and the excitement of what will transpire in the coming decades. Author Alan Boss's perspective on this story is unmatched. Boss is the Chair of NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program Analysis Group, and was also on the Kepler Mission science team. Kepler proved that essentially every star in the night sky has a planetary system, and that most of these systems contain a habitable world, potentially capable of evolving and supporting life. Universal Life summarizes the current state of exoEarth knowledge, and also reveals what will happen next in the post-Kepler world, namely the narrowing of the search for habitable worlds to the stars that are the closest to Earth, those that offer the best chances for future ground- and space-based telescopes to search for, and detect, possible signs of life in their atmospheres. We have come far in the search for life beyond the Earth, but the most exciting phase is about to begin: we may soon be able to prove that we are not alone in the universe.
About the Author
Alan Boss is a research staff member at the Carnegie Institution's
Department of Terrestrial Magnetism in northwest Washington, D.C.
Boss received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California,
Santa Barbara, in 1979. He spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at
NASA's Ames Reseach Center in California before joining the staff of
DTM in 1981. Boss's theoretical research focuses on using three dimensional
hydrodynamics codes to model the formation of stars and planetary systems.
Boss has proposed an alternative means for forming the gas and ice giant
planets of our Solar System and in extrasolar planetary systems, a scenario
that is much faster than the conventional mechanism. He is a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a Fellow of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, the Meteoritical
Society, and the American Geophysical Union. Boss was the founding chair
of the International Astronomical Union's Working Group on Extrasolar
Planets. He has been helping NASA plan its search for extrasolar planets
since 1988 and continues to be active in helping to guide NASA's
efforts. Boss leads a ground-based astrometric planet search effort
at Carnegie's Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. He has published two
books about the search for planets outside the Solar System, "Looking
for Earths: The Race to Find New Solar Systems" in 1998, and "The
Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets" in 2009. He is currently
the chair of NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Technology Assessment Committee
(TAC) , the chair of the WFIRST/AFTA Coronagraph TAC, and the chair of the
WFIRST/AFTA IR Detector TAC.
