Podcast: Ring around the Exoplanet

• By Maggie Masetti
• May 29, 2013
• Comments Off on Podcast: Ring around the Exoplanet

Click to listen! (11MB MP3, right-click to save)
Transcript (Text, PDF)

A college friend of Maggie’s, Dr. Eric Mamajek, discovered a cool potential exoplanet system that might also have a ring system – we reported on it last January after the American Astronomical Society exhibit. We checked with Eric a year later to talk more about his discovery, any updates, and the art done of his potential exoplanet system by Ron Miller, who we also recently interviewed (part one, part two).

Here is Ron Miller’s artwork, showing one possibility of what this system might look like.

Image courtesy of Ron Miller

Image courtesy of Ron Miller

More about Exoplanets:

• Read and listen to Blueshift’s ongoing coverage of exoplanets, including background information, exoplanet news, and interviews with astrophysicists discovering and analyzing these exciting new worlds.
• Visit NASA’s PlanetQuest website for the latest news about exoplanets – including an up-to-date tracker of how many planets have been found (and how many candidates are waiting to be confirmed).
• Join the citizen science project Planet Hunters and comb through Kepler data looking for the signatures of planets orbiting distant stars. You might even get named as a co-author of a paper about a new exoplanet discovery.