Exoplanets

Gr 3–5—Carefully tailoring his presentation to keep it from dating too rapidly, the veteran science explainer surveys one of the hottest areas of discovery in astronomy today. After opening with a definition of the "Goldilocks" zone (the area in which habitable exoplanets must orbit in order to be not too hot, not too cold, etc.), he goes on to mention the ingenious methods by which "more than several thousand" exoplanets have been spotted, describes what can be deduced about them from observational evidence, then closes with ruminations about why both the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) that has been going on since 1960 and the more recent Breakthrough Listen project have failed to elicit any signs of civilizations beyond our own. He offers only a handful of specific examples, and misleadingly claims that Breakthrough Listen "was begun" by Stephen Hawking (who is a supporter, not a founder), but thin spots are inevitable in such a quick survey. More problematically, though the big space photos and artists' conceptions pop nicely, several, notably a blurry representation of what it would be like to walk through a nebula and an abstract stream of filaments captioned "Listening to space," are just filler that is more likely to leave viewers confused than informed.