Astronomers find water vapor on distant, temperate planet

Laura Kreidberg never thought she’d study exoplanets. Sure, when she began graduate school in 2011, the worlds beyond our solar system were all the rage. NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope had launched two years earlier, and detections were flowing in. But Dr. Kreidberg was lukewarm.

“This is just a flash in the pan,” she recalls thinking. We’ll identify some planets, calculate how big they are and how fast they orbit their stars, and then the excitement will die down. Their other features would remain in the realm of imagination, she thought. After all, how much could you really see from so far away?

So when a professor told her that he was trying to study not just exoplanets,