Strange New Worlds – The Search for Alien Planets…and Life Beyond Our Solar Systemby Ray Jayawardhana ; Princeton University Press; Princeton, New Jersey; $24.95; (hard cover) March 2011.
This delightful and engaging book tells the story of humankind’s quest to locate extra-solar planets and extraterrestrial life. The reader will find the volume very readable, loaded with up-to-date facts, including an overview of findings from NASA’s planet seeker, the Kepler mission.
Finding inhabited worlds will be a dramatic moment, Jayawardhana writes. Furthermore, the author declares that this flash of news may well occur in our lifetime, if not during the next decade.
To prepare for that likely happening, this book provides a tutorial on the people and current techniques used to scope out other worlds.
Special treatment is given to finding signs of life. That pursuit has “brought together researchers of different stripes to launch the field of astrobiology,” the author explains. Indeed, looking for biosignatures – indicating the existence of living organisms – is gathering momentum.
On the other hand, radio or optical signal detection via the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) could win the race for finding ET. While spotting biosignatures is one tactic, deducing slime from a civilization, Jayawardhana points out, will leave us wondering. Complementary research approaches should give us the answer to the “are we alone” question.
This is an informative, in-depth and insider story by this university of Toronto astrophysics professor, one that underscores how fast-moving the search for far away worlds and life elsewhere has become.
For more information on this book, go to:
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9404.html
By Leonard David