David Kipping

Kipping grew up in a small town in England, loved Star TrekStar TrekStar Trek is a science-fiction franchise originating in the work of Gene Roddenberry. Its central subjects include exploration aboard starships, encounters across cultures and humanity’s future. It spans television, film, animation and other media, with a long-established fan community.Open the full entry, wanted to be an astronaut and memorized the names and masses of all the planets in the solar system and their moons; supportive teachers encouraged him to pursue physics.⁠[1]

He was eleven when astronomers found 51 Pegasi b, the first exoplanet orbiting a sun-like star, in 1995.⁠[2]

He completed his undergraduate degree in Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge in 2007, then pursued a PhD in astrophysics at University College London, finishing in 2011 with a thesis on new approaches to discovering extrasolar moons.⁠[3]

During his PhD, while hiking in the Himalayas, he realized that a large enough moon would alter a planet’s transit light curve; in 2009 he published a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society showing that the Kepler telescope could also be used to search for exomoons.⁠[1]

After his PhD he worked at HarvardHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry as a postdoc through the Sagan and Menzel fellowships.⁠[4]

As a NASANASAThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the U.S. federal agency responsible for the civilian space program, aeronautics research and space science. Established by law in 1958 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., it has run programs including Mercury, the Apollo Moon landings, the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station and Artemis.Open the full entry Carl Sagan fellow at Harvard he launched the first observational program for exomoons.⁠[3]

In fall 2015 he joined Columbia University’s astronomy department and started the Cool Worlds lab to study extrasolar planetary systems.⁠[2]

In July 2017, after surveying nearly 300 Kepler planets, he and his PhD student Alex Teachey tentatively announced that the planet Kepler-1625b might have a moon; that October they used the Hubble Space Telescope to observe the system’s next transit for 40 hours.⁠[5]

In 2018 he received a Sloan Research Fellowship; he had earlier been named to Popular Science’s “Brilliant Ten” in 2015 and Science News’ “Ten Scientists to Watch” in 2017. At Columbia he leads the Cool Worlds lab and hosts the Cool Worlds YouTube channel, explaining the group’s research to nonscientists.⁠[6]

On October 3, 2018, Teachey and Kipping published a paper in Science Advances describing a possible Neptune-sized moon around Kepler-1625b.⁠[5]

In April 2019, a team led by Laura Kreidberg reanalyzed the Hubble data and found no moonlike dip, while René Heller’s team judged the statistical evidence insufficient for a secure detection. In a response paper Teachey and Kipping found no problems with Kreidberg’s analysis but maintained that the moon’s existence remained an open question.⁠[7]

Their request for Hubble time to observe the next transit in May 2019 was denied; Kipping noted that later transits become much harder to predict.⁠[8]

In May 2020 he published a study in PNAS that used Bayesian inference on the timeline of life and humanity on Earth, finding the common-life scenario at least nine times more likely than the rare-life one, while the odds that intelligence is rare were only about 3:2.⁠[9]

In 2020 he applied Bayesian reasoning to Nick BostromNick BostromNick Bostrom is a Swedish-born philosopher who was founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford from 2005 to 2024 and is known for his work on existential risk, the simulation argument and his book Superintelligence; now principal researcher at the Macrostrategy Research Initiative, he appeared on the Lex Fridman Podcast in 2020.Open the full entry’s simulation argument, finding the posterior probability that we live in base reality almost equal to, and slightly above, that of living in a simulation. Bostrom called his equal-prior assumption “rather shaky”; Kipping himself said the simulation hypothesis may not be falsifiable.⁠[10]

In January 2022 his team, after studying 70 cold gas giants, announced a second exomoon candidate: a moon about 2.6 times Earth’s size around Kepler-1708b, a Jupiter-size planet 5,500 light-years away, with about a 1% probability of being something else. He called exomoons “terra incognita.”⁠[11]

On January 28, 2023, he appeared on episode 355 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, discussing habitable exoplanets, alien life in the solar system, the James Webb Space Telescope, exomoons and Kepler-1625b, the Kardashev scale, the Great Filter and the simulation hypothesis.⁠[12]

The Cool Worlds Lab, part of Columbia’s astronomy department, focuses on detecting and analyzing worlds at longer orbital periods, including their satellites, rings and habitability, and often pursues side projects.⁠[13]

The lab accepts regular public donations through Columbia’s giving platform, saying 95% of each gift reaches its research fund, and describes a cycle in which research leads to public communication and public support.⁠[14]

Cool Worlds Lab: Official website: https://www.coolworldslab.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[13]

YouTube: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/coolworldslab (opens in a new window)⁠[13]

X: Public account: https://x.com/david_kipping (opens in a new window)⁠[13]

Columbia University: Official website: https://www.columbia.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[4]

Harvard University: Official website: https://www.harvard.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[4]