Rock Solid Evidence for Other Earths

Is our planet unique? The chances are slim. There are trillions of other galaxies, each of which has billions of suns. In a recent interview, Ed Young, a professor of geochemistry and cosmochemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles, tells me it may be a toss up whether a sun has a rocky planet orbiting it. But astronomers have now identified, according to NASA, more than 4,000 exoplanets, bodies orbiting a sun other than our own. “The odds are slowly increasing that other Earths exist out there,” Young says.

Young himself has boosted the odds. In a paper published this month with the unwieldy title, “Oxygen fugacities of extrasolar rocks: Evidence for an Earth-like geochemistry of exoplanets,” Young and his coauthors, employing a refined method of gauging the makeup of exoplanets, conclude “that at least some rocky exoplanets are geophysically and geochemically similar to Earth.” Young and one of his coauthors, Alexandra Doyle, a graduate student in astrochemistry, detailed in our conversation—doing a fine job defining technical terms—what makes their