exocast

For this episode the Exocast team are joined by Dr Matthew Kenworthy from the University of Leiden, The Netherlands. Matt’s work focuses on strange transit events and the search for new ways to better process data. Matt started his career in the instrumentation lab and we dive into that transition to more remote hands-off research. We talk about his work with the assassin, sorry ASASSN, network and the search for weird dips, and then what the future of instrumentation holds for our search for planets in the universe. In addition, as always we ask our guest to adopt an exoplanet into our Exocast family with Matt choosing PSR 1829-10 – listen in to find out why and if it exists at all!? Matt is a British astronomer who did his PhD at the University of Cambridge after an undergrad at Oxford, he then held postdocs at Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona, and then at the University of Cincinnati then back at Steward as an instrument scientist, however he has been working and living in the Netherlands for the over a decade as a professor at the Leiden Observatory. Do you have a question we didn’t ask? Join in the discussion in the comments below, and find us on bluesky. You can also get your hands on Exocast merchandise at exocast.threadless.com Exocast is edited by musician/composer Fergus Hall (https://www.fergushallmusic.com) and is supported by listener donations at buymeacoffee.com/exocast. We cannot make the show without your support and it is very much appreciated.

Join the Exocast team as they chat with Dr Malena Rice an expert on planetary and exoplanetary dynamics through both theory and observation. Malena tells us about her journey into professional astronomy. Malena grew up and attended college in California before moving to the east coast for grad school in the Yale Department of Astronomy, only taking a quick one years’ break as 51 Peg fellow at MIT before returning to Yale as an Assistant Professor in 2023. We ask what the first year as a faculty member is like and how she approaches her research and outreach.

For this episode the Exocast team are joined by Dr Benjamin (Ben) Pope from the University of Queensland, Brisbane. Ben has worked on everything from transit light curve modelling, to direct imaging instrumentation, to using tree rings to study solar activity and we try desperately to cover it all in the episode. Ben shares with us what excites him the most about the search for exoplanets and how instrumentation developments drive or understanding of these worlds and more importantly (to some) their stars. In addition, as always we ask our guest to adopt an exoplanet into our Exocast family with Ben choosing K2-110b which holds a special significance for him and one of our Exocast hosts – listen to find out more! Ben completed a PhD in the UK at Oxford before being awarded a NASA Sagan Fellowship which he took to NYU in the USA. He is now faculty at the University of Queensland where his group works on methods of directly imaging exoplanets. Do you have a question we didn’t ask? Join in the discussion in the comments below, and find us on Twitter, bluesky, and mastodon. You can also get your hands on Exocast merchandise at exocast.threadless.com Exocast is edited by musician/composer Fergus Hall (https://www.fergushallmusic.com) and is supported by listener donations at buymeacoffee.com/exocast. We cannot make the show without your support and it is very much appreciated.

The Exocast team are joined on this episode by Dr. Louise Nielsen, a Danish astronomer who, after a batchelor’s degree at Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, moved to the Geneva Observatory for a PhD focussing on radial velocity (RV) observations of exoplanets. Louise then completed postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Oxford and the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Garching, before joining the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich as a staff astronomer in 2023. Louise discusses RV of young planets, follow-up of candidates found by TESS, the future of RV surveys, and she also outlines her early work with ground-based transit surveys including the now-ended WASP survey and NGTS. As is tradition, Louise also adds another interesting exoplanet to our growing list of Adopted Planets. Danish speakers should check out her astronomy podcast Stjerneklart. Do you have a question we didn’t ask? Join in the discussion in the comments below, and find us on Twitter, bluesky, and mastodon. You can also get your hands on Exocast merchandise at exocast.threadless.com Exocast is edited by musician/composer Fergus Hall (https://www.fergushallmusic.com) and is supported by listener donations at buymeacoffee.com/exocast. We cannot make the show without your support and it is very much appreciated.

The Exocast team are joined on this show by Jules Fowler, a NSF Graduate Research Fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where they work to improve extreme adaptive optics technologies and seek the signatures of exoplanets in polarized light. Jules also shares insights gleaned from four years working as an analyst and science software engineer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), where they had the pleasure of collaborating with Exocast’s own Hannah Wakeford to discover transiting exoplanets. As always, listen to the show to find out which ‘planet’ (hint) Jules has adopted into our hall-of-fame this time… Do you have a question we didn’t ask? Join in the discussion in the comments below, and find us on Twitter, bluesky, and mastodon. You can also get your hands on Exocast merchandise at exocast.threadless.com Exocast is edited by musician/composer Fergus Hall (https://www.fergushallmusic.com) and is supported by listener donations at buymeacoffee.com/exocast. We cannot make the show without your support and it is very much appreciated.

In this most excellent 100th episode of Exocast from the team we bring you the latest in exoplanet research and news. Hannah and Andrew cover news from the TRAPPIST system. Hannah will dive into the JWST results that have come out about this very famous system of seven Earth-sized rocky planets. Two papers look to the mid-infrared to measure the light directly from the planets b and c in emission – finding that they likely do not have an atmosphere possibly stripped by their stars radiation. The first spectroscopic measurements of TRAPPIST show that the star itself is going to be the “star” of the show with stellar contamination dominating the data. But we remain optimistic! 5 more planets await their observations and there is much to learn about this small cool star. Andrew covers a paper that discusses the feasibility of detecting some biosignatures from TRAPPIST-1 d and e using JWST. This “experimental sandbox” for astrobiology makes TRAPPIST the perfect place to start. The theoretical studies uses a climate model to ask the question: what could we see if it was there? The model looks for methane, carbon dioxide, oxygen, ozone, methyl chloride, and methyl mercaptan; with methane and carbon dioxide pair being the best combo to suggest something out of equilibrium possibly caused by life. But is the question we should be asking, is this the right system to look for life at all? – what do you think? Hugh then takes us back to formation in a dramatic fashion with an astronomical mystery. A young star has been dimming and almost disappeared for over a year with variations in the starlight over nearly 1000 days. The question simply is: What is going on? It is almost always something to do with dust. This can be seen over different wavelengths showing the dust interacting with the light. But in this case the exciting new result is that about 3 years before the dimming happened, a bright event was seen in the system. What the team found through simulations suggest that there was a giant collision of planets in that system that created the bright event and then the debris field blocking the light. Space is really remarkable! 100 episodes is a huge milestone and as always Hugh, Hannah, and Andrew could not do this show without you! Thank you for listening. Exocast is edited by Fergus Hall. You can help support Exocast and the team at BuyMeACoffee.com/exocast, and get yourself some Exocast merch at exocast.threadless.com

Hugh, Hannah, & Andrew discuss a handful of interesting recent exoplanet papers from the past few months. We chat about the news coverage of K2-18b and the claims of biomarkers in that atmosphere, new discoveries, exciting atmospheres, and haze formation. Hannah dives into the controversy of K2-18b and the announcement of DMS (a biomarker on Earth) detection amongst a methane dominated spectrum “Carbon-bearing Molecules in a Possible Hycean Atmosphere” by Madhusudhan et al.. The team discuss the responsibility we have as scientists to portray the statistics (in this case the lack of evidence to support the claim) to the press and how extraordinary claims require extraordinary care. Hugh highlights a new discovery of “A close-in giant planet escapes engulfment by its star” by Hon et al. And finally, Andrew explores “Planetary Scale Information Transmission in the Biosphere and Technosphere: Limits and Evolution” by Lingham et al. Exocast is edited by Fergus Hall. Image credit: Artistic ilustration of planet K2-18b, its star K2-18 and the second planet K2-18. Credit: Alex Boersma You can help support Exocast and the team at BuyMeACoffee.com/exocast, and get yourself some Exocast merch at exocast.threadless.com

In this episode Andrew, Hannah, and Hugh discuss the art and science of organising, and attending, scientific conferences, with a particular focus on the recent Exoclimes VI meeting held in Exeter, UK, organised by Hannah and others in the exoplanet community. These meetings are crucial for the dissemination and communication of new results among the community and further afield, but they can be daunting to attend, and very stressful to organise. The team share their personal experiences with conference attendence and organising and consider the changing role and format of the science conference in modern academia. Do you have a question we didn’t ask? Join in the discussion in the comments below, and find us on Twitter. You can also get your hands on Exocast merchandise at exocast.threadless.com Exocast is edited by musician/composer Fergus Hall (https://www.fergushallmusic.com) and is supported by listener donations at buymeacoffee.com/exocast. Each coffee costs $4 and donations over $15 get a shout-out on the show. We cannot make the show without your support and it is very much appreciated.

The Exocast team are back and this time joined by the esteemed Nikole Lewis, Professor and Deputy director of the Carl Sagan institute at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, USA. We chat all things career, JWST, the future of exoplanet characterisation with the Roman Space Telescope and Nikole add her favourite Neptune mass exoplanet GJ 436b to the Exocast Adopted Planets archive.

In this episode Andrew, Hannah, and Hugh reflect on where their careers and research in exoplanet science have led over the past few years as a chance to (re)introduce ourselves to new and regular listeners alike! We hope you’ll appreciate a slightly different format for this show. Do you have a question we didn’t ask? Join in the discussion in the comments below, and find us on Twitter. You can also get your hands on Exocast merchandise at exocast.threadless.com Exocast is edited by musician/composer Fergus Hall (https://www.fergushallmusic.com) and is supported by listener donations at buymeacoffee.com/exocast. Each coffee costs $4 and donations over $15 get a shout out on the show. We cannot make the show without your support and it is very much appreciated. A huge thank you to mraroid for their ongoing donations to the show!

Back on the airwaves after a short hiatus, the Exocast team are delighted to be joined by Georgina (George) Dransfield, a PhD student at the University of Birmingham in the UK, who works on finding new exoplanets using the transit method. George uses data from ground-based surveys like SPECULOOS and space-based surveys like TESS and is also is somewhat unique in observing from Antarctica, specifically using and helping to run the ASTEP pipeline. Of course, George also adds a new planet to our adopted exoplanet family. You’ll have to listen to the show to find out which one she chooses, but it is definitely worth it for the personal and cultural connection to a distant world… George also mentions a great exoplanet resource pack for teachers, made by the IOP for children aged 11-14, which can be found here: https://spark.iop.org/collections/teaching-exoplanets Do you have a question we didn’t ask? Join in the discussion in the comments below, and find us on Twitter. You can also get your hands on Exocast merchandise at exocast.threadless.com Exocast is edited by musician/composer Fergus Hall (https://www.fergushallmusic.com) and is supported by listener donations at buymeacoffee.com/exocast. Each coffee costs $4 and donations over $15 get a shout out on the show. We cannot make the show without your support and it is very much appreciated. A big thank you to Rick Schwarz, Brian Krelle, and @moylecroft for donations of coffee over the past couple of months

In this episode the team cover some of the latest exoplanet news stories. This month Hannah summarises the most recent exoplanetary science coming out of JWST’s early release science programs; Andrew tells us a bit about the habitability of Enceladus’s subsurface ocean, and Hugh talks about a new observation of compositional differences for planets around M-dwarfs.