Moving further forward, it will important to directly observe representative exoplanets to study their properties in detail and to investigate the signs and possibilities for life. How are these planets formed? Do any systems exist that are like our Solar System? To discover this, we need to look at planets on longer orbits beyond the snow line (the distance from the star where water, carbon dioxide and other volatiles can become ice) to give a complete picture of the orbits and distribution of the planets within the Galaxy. But while thousands of extrasolar planets have been discovered to date, the majority of these have orbits relatively close to their star with distances less than the orbit of the Earth around the Sun at 1 astronomical unit (the average distance between the Sun and the Earth). More than 100 billion stars in our Galaxy are thought to host planetary systems, including that of our own Solar System. To gather clues, the expansion rate of the Universe over 10 billion years must be examined very precisely, and the distribution of hundreds of millions of galaxies and dark matter accurately measured, to identify slight features due to the existence and nature of dark energy. The existence of “dark energy” is thought to have caused the Universe to undergo an accelerated expansion, and the details are one of the biggest mysteries of modern cosmology. That expansion is determined by the energy and matter that exist in the Universe. It is known that the galaxies were born from the slight fluctuations in density at the very beginning of the Universe, but their formation, distribution and structure depended on how the Universe expanded. How did the Universe begin, and how did evolve to what we now see? How many planets are out there that are similar to the Earth? These are questions fundamental to not only astronomy, but for the whole of humankind.
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