Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

SEARCHING FOR OTHER EARTHS WITH PROFESSOR MORGANA MAYHEM

QUICK QUIZ TIME: WHAT'S THE CLOSEST STAR TO YOU RIGHT NOW? If you said the North Star- you're wrong. ZERO POINTS. The correct answer, as all supervillains should know, is the SUN. Our Sun is actually A TOTALLY NORMAL AND BORING STAR. (OKAY, IT'S NOT ACTUALLY BORING. IT'S BASICALLY A BILLION BILLION BILLION TON NUCLEAR BOMB, WHICH IS ABOUT AS FAR FROM BORING AS YOU CAN GET.) But the Sun IS pretty average, as stars go. And if our totally average star is surrounded by planets, shouldn't that mean that all the other stars in the Universe also have planets? BRACE YOURSELF.

THIS ONE'S A BIGGIE. THE ANSWER IS... YES! As special as we think our Solar System is, IT TURNS OUT THAT MOST STARS IN THE UNIVERSE HAVE PLANETS GOING AROUND THEM. Think of how much time we spend learning about our own Solar System- and now think that THERE ARE AROUND 100 BILLION SOLAR SYSTEMS IN OUR GALAXY! THIS BLOWS MY MIND. TOLD YOU IT WAS A BIGGIE.

Okay, so we shouldn't STRICTLY be calling these other stars and planets "Solar Systems." Our Solar System is called "THE SOLAR SYSTEM" because it's named after the Sun (and the word for Sun in Latin is "Sol"). SOLAR SYSTEM. GET IT? So, being strict, if the star YZ CETI has planets, we should probably call it the YZ Ceti-ar System. But that is annoying and hard to pronounce, so I'm going to call them all Solar Systems. AND NOBODY CAN STOP ME.

HOW TO FIND A PLANET IN A DISTANT SOLAR SYSTEM I know what you're thinking- you know exactly how to find distant planets. Just get the BIGGEST TELESCOPE you can find and look really hard. Staring at stuff through big telescopes is basically what astronomy is all about. YOU GET HALF A POINT FOR THIS BEING A GOOD IDEA. But MINUS A MILLION POINTS because it's totally wrong. PLANETS. are ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO SEE next to their stars because they are so TINY-BITTY (COMPARED TO THEIR STARS, THAT IS... PLANETS ARE OBVIOUSLY PRETTY BIG COMPARED TO, FOR EXAMPLE, A HAMSTER).