by Rich Sherman

Book Review:  Hidden in the Heavens: How the Kepler Mission’s Quest for New Planets Changed How We View Our Own

By Jason Steffen

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Date: 2024

Price on Amazon: $14.89 (hardcover)

Grade A-

This is a very good book with lots of details about the Kepler Mission and how it opened our eyes to the abundance, the complexity, and the divergence of planetary systems from our own solar system.  

We have had author and Princeton University professor Dr. Joshua Winn speak at AAAP meetings a couple times about his work with TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. But Kepler was the first mission, and the findings from Kepler led to TESS and our current-but-evolving understanding of planetary systems. If you want to learn more about how the Kepler telescope was designed, how it worked, and its revelations about Hot Jupiters and Hot Earths then by all means purchase this book. But I would add: don’t expect any Hubble-like photographs, because that is not how Kepler worked, and certainly don’t expect to read this book in a weekend. There is a lot of terminology that makes it a bit challenging and I think the book would have greatly benefited from a glossary. On a positive note, Professor Steffen does a nice job reviewing the key concepts and key discoveries in the final chapter.

In conclusion, I learned a lot from reading “Hidden in the Heavens.” I have come to better appreciate the uniqueness of our solar system (at least based on our technological limitations in finding and measuring planetary systems like ours) and our peculiar home planet. In addition, I gained an even deeper respect for the great minds that blend mathematics, chemistry, astronomy, and physics to find and analyze exoplanets. It is remarkable how professional scientists can determine what happened, how it happened, and what will happen next in planetary systems using the Kepler and TESS data.

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