Jessamyn Fairfield
speaker
401 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 30 Aug
Jessamyn Fairfield’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Like it is much easier to detect these kind of like mega gas giants that are very close to the star that they orbit.
They're more luminous.
They're more likely to block out some of their own star's light as they pass across it.
Finding these smaller rocky planets is really difficult.
And I would have said that- They're shy, essentially.
the adjustment yeah they're just little cuties um but if we're trying to find them and trying to figure out whether they have an atmosphere or not that's again like an order of magnitude more difficult uh but what this team has found is not only that this um it's about five times the mass of earth planet that's orbiting a red dwarf so it would be in the 10 to sort of 60 mass of the sun um
for the star itself.
And what they can actually see is that there's helium escaping from the planet.
So they were able to use like spectrophotometry to see that there are signatures of helium that's coming off the planet, which implies not only that there's some sort of helium in the atmosphere on that planet, but also that there's probably heavier gases that are trapped further down.
Helium, obviously we know from balloons, is a very light gas.
So it's maybe not surprising that this is sort of the first signature of an atmosphere on this planet.
But
Yeah, just very exciting to see a planet that's so much more like ours in this intensifying hunt for exoplanets.
Can we see grass on this planet?
Not yet, but if we think about those elements for life, not to make everything about us, but as we look for other planets that might host something that looks more like us than what we found in the universe so far, like a rocky planet, a planet with an atmosphere, the next steps will be to look for the traces of more complicated molecules that might be in the atmosphere.
And these red dwarf stars, like the one that this planet, the planet's name is LHS 1140b.
These red dwarf stars that it orbits are the most common type of star in the Milky Way.
So there's a potential to find a lot more planets like this, especially as red dwarf stars are dimmer than our own star.
So the possibility to see these kind of faint traces of like a rocky planet and then a rocky planet with an atmosphere would be much more likely.
I don't know why I'm focusing on grass, but I'm just looking at grass at the moment.
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