The Planet Factory

“She’s…interested in the quirks of the planets. I wouldn’t call it The Guinness Book of Records approach, but there’s a bit of that. She says, ‘Wow, there are oddball planets!’ Then she takes it beyond that, and asks, ‘How do they happen? How does nature make these strange planets? Why are they strange compared to the planets in our solar system? Is our solar system dull? Is it typical?’ These are important scientific questions, but she does have a lot of fun with the oddballs—the planet where it’s raining molten lava or diamonds or the planets that have been stretched into a pear shape because they’re so close to their star. She writes about all sorts of extreme planets that we’ve found.” Read more...

The best books on Exoplanets

Chris Impey, Scientist