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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 [https://twitter.com/exo_cast], bluesky [http://exocast.bsky.social], and mastodon [https://mastodon.online/@exocast]. You can also get your hands on Exocast merchandise at exocast.threadless.com [http://exocast.threadless.com] Exocast is edited by musician/composer Fergus Hall (https://www.fergushallmusic.com [https://www.fergushallmusic.com]) and is supported by listener donations at buymeacoffee.com/exocast [http://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 [https://carolinedorn.ch/]. 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 [https://copl.ethz.ch/]. 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 [https://www.exocast.org/adopted-planets/]. Do you have a question we didn’t ask? Join in the discussion in the comments below, and find us on Twitter [https://twitter.com/exo_cast], bluesky [http://exocast.bsky.social], and mastodon [https://mastodon.online/@exocast]. You can also get your hands on Exocast merchandise at exocast.threadless.com [http://exocast.threadless.com] Exocast is edited by musician/composer Fergus Hall (https://www.fergushallmusic.com [https://www.fergushallmusic.com]) and is supported by listener donations at buymeacoffee.com/exocast [http://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 [https://louisedyregaard.github.io/], 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 [https://stjerneklart.dk/]. Do you have a question we didn’t ask? Join in the discussion in the comments below, and find us on Twitter [https://twitter.com/exo_cast], bluesky [http://exocast.bsky.social], and mastodon [https://mastodon.online/@exocast]. You can also get your hands on Exocast merchandise at exocast.threadless.com [http://exocast.threadless.com] Exocast is edited by musician/composer Fergus Hall (https://www.fergushallmusic.com [https://www.fergushallmusic.com]) and is supported by listener donations at buymeacoffee.com/exocast [http://buymeacoffee.com/exocast]. We cannot make the show without your support and it is very much appreciated.