exocast

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 AssistantRead more

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 ofRead more

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 theseRead more

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 herRead more

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 discussesRead more