Exoplanets: The Astronomer Looking into Alien Worlds

We know next to nothing about the other 6 billion or so Earth-like exoplanets in the galaxy. With the imminent launch of the largest, most powerful space telescope ever built, Laura Kreidberg is optimistic this will soon change. Kreidberg is the founding director of a new department at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, devoted to studying what the weather is like on alien worlds. NASA’s $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), set to launch in December after decades of planning and construction, will allow her to peer into alien skies and, she said, “turn these planets into places.”