On This Day in History: January 9

First exoplanet

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The only place in the universe that we know for certain doesn’t totally suck for human life is where your ass is parked right now. Mars? Sucks. Venus? You’d fucking melt. Mercury? Tidally locked; one side is hot as balls, the other butt-ass cold. And fuck gas giants. But what about planets outside our solar system?

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: January 9, 1992--

We figured they had to exist, what with the gazillions of stars. So, we looked. And looked. And on January 9, 1992, a couple of astronomers named Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail found the first ever exoplanets. But how did they find them, how many have been found since, and why do they all suck?

There were speculations of the existence of exoplanets as far back as the 16th century, and also several discredited claims of having detected them. But Wolzczan and Frail found exoplanets in the strangest of places, 2,300 light years away, orbiting the pulsar PSR B1257+12. It was supposed to pulse every 0.006219 seconds. But sometimes it was off a bit. Sounds like trying to separate fly shit from pepper. The real “something’s fucky here” came when the pair realized the off-beat pulses came at regular intervals. They soon discovered it was two planets, one three times larger and the other four times larger than Earth, going around the pulsar.

Pulsars are more radioactive than a Chernobyl sarcophagus, so fuck those planets. What about ones around regular stars like ours, a main-sequence star? One was found in 1995, a giant fucker in a mere four-day orbit around 51 Pegasi, only 50 light years away. Since then, as of late 2021, close to 5,000 exoplanets have been detected. Some have been directly imaged, but most are detected via more indirect means, such as the transit method. That’s when we can “see” a planet because it blocks a portion of its star’s light when it passes in front of it.

Kepler-452B was found in July 2015 and branded Earth 2.0 because it was the first rocky planet discovered in habitable zone distance from its star, and it probably has liquid water too. It’s a big fucker though, five times the mass of Earth. Yay! More to colonize and exploit! Except you better start working out, because the gravity is 1.9 times that of Earth. It’s also over 1,400 light years away.

And that’s why all these exoplanets suck: distance. I mean, let’s imagine one has a breathable atmosphere, and by some miracle evolution created an environment where we can grow food that doesn’t poison the shit out of us, and unlike the Americas or Africa or Australia there aren’t already a bunch of sentient beings there who’d rather we didn’t take their shit. How the fuck are you gonna get there?

Until someone invents wormhole technology or some shit, the distances are impossibly vast, making exoplanets a curiosity not a practicality. We need to fix our own planet, the best fucking planet in the universe for our species.

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