David Kipping

It's both incredibly exciting intellectually, but

you're always risking, to some degree, the pushing too far.

I'd say there's like three or four candidates at this point, of which we have published two of them.

And to me, two are quite compelling and deserve follow-up observations.

And so to get a confirmed detection, at least in our case, we would need to see it repeat for sure.

One of the problems with some of the other methods that have been proposed is that you don't get that repeatability.

So for instance, an example of a technique that would lack that would be gravitational microlensing.

So it is possible with a new telescope coming up in the future called the Roman Space Telescope, which is basically a repurpose by satellite that's the size of the Hubble mirror going up into space.

It will stare at millions of stars simultaneously, and it will look to see, instead of whether any of those stars get dimmer for a short amount of time, which would be a transit, it'll look for the opposite.

It'll look to see if anything can get brighter.

And that brightness increase is caused by another planetary system passing in front and then gravitationally lensing light around it to cause a brightening.

And so this is a method of

discovering an entire solar system, but only for a glimpse.

You just get a short glimpse of it passing like a ship sailing through the night, just that one photo of it.

Now, the problem with that is that it's very difficult.

The physics of gravitational lensing are not surprisingly quite complicated, and so there's many, many possible solutions.

So you might have a solution, which is this could be a red dwarf star,

with a Jupiter-like planet around it.

That's one solution.

But another solution is that it's a free-floating planet, a rogue planet like Jupiter with an Earth-like moon around it.