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For this episode the Exocast team are joined by Dr Megan Weiner Mansfield from the University of Maryland, USA. Megan’s work focuses on the measurement of exoplanet atmospheres with a particular look at the eclipse as the planet passes behind the star and we can measure the thermal dayside of tidally locked giants. We talk about the paradigm shift that JWST has brought to the field and some really cool techniques that can be used to dive into the atmospheres of these alien worlds more. In addition, as always we ask our guest to adopt an exoplanet into our Exocast family with Megan choosing GJ 486b – listen in to find out why! Megan completed a PhD at the University of Chicago in Geophysical Science before being awarded a NASA Sagan Fellowship which she took to the University of Arizona and later awarded a 51 Pegasi Fellowship at Arizona State University. She is now faculty at the University of Maryland where her group works on methods of measuring exoplanet atmospheres from observations and theory. 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.

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.

We sat around our virtual studio to chat with Queensland-based astronomer Jonti Horner, who works on planetary dynamics – both within our own solar system, and around others. As well as discovering the impact of giant planet dynamics on habitable planets like earth, we also discussed the importance of aboriginal astronomy in Australia, his various media appearances, and Jonti’s namesake asteroid. Finally, Jonti adopts a special planet into our hall-of-fame list. Listen to find out more! 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.

This month the gang sit in with Dr Eamonn Kerins, expert in gravitational microlensing from the University of Manchester. He tells us how astronomers can find extremely distant exoplanets through the warping effect their mass has on light itself; and takes us through the past, present and future of one of the more obscure exoplanet detection methods. This includes how ESA’s Euclid mission could contribute to NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman campaign to find hundreds of new planets in the galactic bulge. We also hear about his journey through astronomy, and outreach projects including as a Green Alien at Jodrell Bank.

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 exoplanetary interior investigator Professor Caroline Dorn. Caroline started her career in Earth sciences and geophysics, studying for her PhD aquifer systems at the University of Lausanne, before switching her focus to the interiors of more distant worlds in 2013 with postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Bern and Zurich. As of April 2023, Caroline is an Assistant Professor for exoplanet science at ETH Zürich, and her newly established interdisciplinary exoplanet research group at the Institute for Particle Physics and Astrophysics is also part of the Center of Origin and Prevalence of Life. Caroline outlines what we can learn about the interior structure of rocky exoplanets from mass and radius measurements, as well as how these planets may form and evolve over time and whether plate tectonics is necessary for sustaining an atmosphere and for habitability. As always, Caroline also adds another interesting exoplanet to our growing list of Adopted Planets. 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 Dr. Néstor Espinoza from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, USA. Néstor is an Assistant Astronomer and Mission Scientist for Hubble and JWST at STScI, where he focusses on transiting exoplanets and their stars. He also provides support for HST and JWST as Mission Scientist for Exoplanet Science in the Instrument Division, and Néstor speaks to the Exocast gang about balancing these distinct roles, as well as his interest in developing open-source modelling and analysis tools for exoplanet science. As always, Néstor also adds an exoplanet to our growing list of Adopted Planets; this one may be familiar to regular listeners…! 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.

The Exocast team return from a short hiatus to be joined on this show by Dr Jason Wang from Northwestern University in Illinois. Jason is a direct imager, and gives us a quick overview of how we are able to find and characterise planets through direct imaging, as well as discussing the Gemini Planet Imager, 51 Eridani b, KPIC, VLT’s Gravity, and the making of the well-known, jaw-dropping animation of the planetary system around HR 8799. Listen to the show to find out which planet Jason has adopted into our hall-of-fame as Exocast’s ‘Adopt-a-planet’ returns. 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. Movie of the HR 8799 planets orbiting their star. Image produced by Dr Jason Wang

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

In this episode, Hannah, Hugh, and Andrew ask the question: Do all planets orbit stars?  Even though the vast majority of planets found so far are bound to a star, there have been detections of planetary-mass objects floating alone through space. Are these planets? How do these objects form, and how can we detect them? Is it possible that these free-floating objects could be considered ‘habitable’? The exocast gang tackle these tricky topics and other nomenclature-related debate surrounding this seemingly simple but deceptively complex question. 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.

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

This month the exocast team chat to exoplanetary astronomer Dr Maximillian Guenther. We talk about finding transiting exoplanets with TESS & NGTS, bright flares from M-dwarf stars, open-source transit modelling, chemical mixing experiments in zero-g aboard the vomit comet, connections between science and art, and his role as project scientist of the ESA CHEOPS mission. And, of course, hear which important and personally connected planetary system he adopted into our hall-of-fame.