otherwyrld 's review for:

The Planet Factory: Exoplanets and the Search for a Second Earth by Elizabeth Tasker

4.0

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This was a great book which not only covered the current search for exoplanets, but also looked in detail at how planets are formed. Not only that, it used reasoned explanations as to how some of the weirder exoplanets (such as hot Jupiters) may come to exist. It turns out that there seems to be almost an infinite variety of types of worlds out there, depending on the enormous number of variables in star and planet formation.This may be bad news for people looking for another Earth because this book pretty much suggests that we won't find one, there are just too many variables to come up with something even close to our own world. This isn't to say that there aren't inhabitable (and inhabited) worlds out there, but we might have to work a lot harder to actually live on them than we would like to think about.

There's a fair amount of technical detail but it is generally handled in a breezy and informative manner, and most people should be able to follow the authors arguments with little difficulty. The author draws no conclusions, but presents us with the facts as they stand at the moment. The only real issue with a book like this is that it lies in such a fast changing science that a lot of the information may be either outdated, superseded or proven wrong within a short space of time.

Still, if you are interested in the subject, this book is well worth the read.