Image Credit: MIT/NASA
This week I was delighted to chat with Dr. Jessie Christiansen about the search for exoplanets and her work on NASA's TESS mission. We chatted about a wide ranging list of topics, including:
How exoplanets are named;
How far away the most distant detected exoplanet is;
The prospects for detecting exomoons;
The oddball nature of many exoplanet systems that have been detected;
And much more.
Dr. Jessie Christiansen is an astrophysicist with the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech, where she searches for, characterizes, and catalogs planets orbiting other stars. In 2018 she was awarded the NASA Exceptional Engineering Achievement Medal for her role with the successful NASA Kepler Mission, which discovered thousands of exoplanets and revealed that rocky planets are common throughout the galaxy.
She now works on the NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) to find and study the nearest planetary systems to Earth – systems that will be perfect for further study with the next generation of ground- and space-based telescopes.
Special shoutout to Launch Pad Astronomy for his SuperChat during the stream!
Our Dom's cheese of the week was Red Witch, a Swiss cheese with a paprika-rubbed peppery red rind.
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Produced by Nancy Graziano.
Cheese for today’s tasting proudly provided by Dom’s Cheese Shop.
Hosted by Paul M. Sutter, astrophysicist and the one and only Agent to the Stars.
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