Last Updated: 11 September 2026
Is the solar system weird? Is Earth weird? How do the planets we know so well “fit in” with the cosmos?
These are all fundamental questions. It’s only been recently that we can begin to scratch the surface by discovering and examining planets in other star systems β the exoplanets.
It’s not an easy task, and detections often have to rely on indirect methods whose observations come with limitations and selection biases. Yet over the course of 30 years, we have confirmed over 6,000 planets (with another 6,000 detected and as-yet unconfirmed).
With that sample - how has this changed our perception of the range of planet types and conditions? Have we found planets very similar to Earth?
In this talk we go through the history of exoplanet research, the techniques used to find them, and try to compare our Solar System to the other systems we’ve discovered, and the “needle in the haystack” search for “Earth twins”.