Louis J Sheehan 654348

Has there been any specific new research triggered by these studies of planets around other stars?
We want to understand a lot of the molecules that we look at in planets around other stars. Those molecules are the exact same molecules as here on Earth, but we now want to see them under very different conditions, very high temperatures and pressures. And so we have to go and study them here on Earth. We’ve been learning a lot about the spectral signatures of water and methane, motivated by these exoplanet studies. Those molecules are crucial to us here on Earth. You’d think we would know everything there is to know about water, but that’s not true.

Did you ever worry that you wouldn’t find anything when you began searching for planets?
I was very nervous at the time that we wouldn’t find any of these planets, or that it wouldn’t turn into a very rich field. It’s given me a great sense of delight to see that those risks were rewarded many times beyond my expectations. But it’s only with accepting a level of risk that there’s the possibility of a truly novel discovery. If you do a very conservative project that you know will be productive, in the sense that it’s going to yield some results, there’s a limit on what is the most exciting thing that could happen within that project. If that thing isn’t something that would really keep you up at night, then why are you going through the motions?

How has planet hunting changed since you started?
Maybe 10, certainly 20, years ago—if you talked about looking for life on other planets, then you were kind of nutty, right? It was probably a very dangerous thing to do if you were a junior faculty who might be looking for tenure, let’s say. And that’s completely changed—I think now there’s this huge sense that we are really going to make this work, and we’re going to figure out how to actually study the atmospheres of these planets that we’re detecting and look for the chemical signatures of biological activity. So that has gone from being a kind of crazy scientific idea that could never be tested to something that’s really at the heart of the big funding agencies, in particular NASA.

Why search for distant planets when there’s still so much we don’t know about our own Earth?
Look back through history and you can find writings from the Greeks that talk about life on planets orbiting other stars. I think there’s been this abiding human question about whether we are alone in the universe. And I think that strikes at the very soul of humanity—of how we picture ourselves in the cosmos. We’ve learned in the last hundred years of the incredible physical size and age of the universe. And now the question is, as it has always been, are we truly alone? And I think that everybody is willing to put in a little bit of money to actually get at the answer to that question.
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