'Star Trek' imagined strange new worlds 60 years ago, but are real exoplanets even stranger?
September 8th, 1966 marked the debut of a television series that would change the world forever. The program was Star Trek, a production that would ignite imaginations across the United States. However, in 1966, astronomers had not yet discovered planets outside our own solar system, known as exoplanets. Yet, the show conjured up a universe filled with diverse worlds, from desert planets to ocean worlds.
Six decades later, astronomers have identified over 6,000 exoplanets, leading to the question: how do these real exoplanets compare to the fictional ones from Star Trek?
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