--- title: Exoplanets and the search for life — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Exoplanets and the search for life», a lesson of the space course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: An exoplanet is a planet going round a star other than our Sun, and we now know thousands of them. --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/26-exoplanets-and-the-search-for-life/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Space](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/) / Exoplanets and the search for life # Exoplanets and the search for life Lesson 26 of the space course of Mova's primary school: 16 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/space/26-exoplanets-and-the-search-for-life/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/26-exoplanets-and-the-search-for-life/0/) — An exoplanet is a planet going round a star other than our Sun, and we now know thousands of them. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/26-exoplanets-and-the-search-for-life/1/) — They are far too faint to see beside their bright stars, so we catch them by tricks: when a planet passes in front of its star, the star dims a tiny bit. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/26-exoplanets-and-the-search-for-life/2/) — It is like a moth flying across a distant lighthouse: you cannot see the moth, but the light flickers. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/26-exoplanets-and-the-search-for-life/3/) — Life as we know it needs liquid water, so scientists look for planets in the "Goldilocks zone", not too hot and not too cold, like Goldilocks' porridge. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/26-exoplanets-and-the-search-for-life/4/) — So far no life has been found beyond Earth, but scientists keep looking, on far-off planets and on icy moons in our own solar system. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/26-exoplanets-and-the-search-for-life/5/) — An exoplanet is a planet that orbits a star other than the Sun, and more than 6,000 have been confirmed, a number still rising. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/26-exoplanets-and-the-search-for-life/6/) — In 1995 Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz found 51 Pegasi b, the first planet known around a Sun-like star, and won a Nobel Prize for it in 2019. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/26-exoplanets-and-the-search-for-life/7/) — Most exoplanets have been found by the transit method: a star dims slightly when a planet passes in front of it. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/26-exoplanets-and-the-search-for-life/8/) — NASA's Kepler telescope, working from 2009 to 2018, found thousands of exoplanets, and TESS has searched almost the whole sky since 2018 for more planets passing in front of their stars. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/26-exoplanets-and-the-search-for-life/10/) — The habitable or "Goldilocks" zone is the band around a star where a planet could have liquid water on its surface, not too hot and not too cold. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/26-exoplanets-and-the-search-for-life/11/) — TRAPPIST-1, a red dwarf (a small, cool, reddish star) about 40 light years away, has seven rocky planets about the size of Earth, some in its habitable zone. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/26-exoplanets-and-the-search-for-life/12/) — The James Webb Space Telescope can study the air of some exoplanets by looking at starlight that has passed through it. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/26-exoplanets-and-the-search-for-life/13/) — In our own solar system scientists look for life on Mars and in the hidden oceans under the ice of Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/26-exoplanets-and-the-search-for-life/14/) — SETI scientists listen with radio telescopes for signals from intelligent life, but no confirmed alien signal has ever been found. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/26-exoplanets-and-the-search-for-life/15/) — Some exoplanets orbit two stars, like Kepler-16b, found in 2011, a real world with two suns in its sky. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/26-exoplanets-and-the-search-for-life/16/) — No life of any kind has yet been confirmed anywhere beyond Earth. - ← previous: [Black holes](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/25-black-holes/) - next →: [Telescopes and light](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/27-telescopes-and-light/) - ↑ back to [Space](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/space/)