Michelle Thaller
speaker
1,835 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 28 May
Michelle Thaller’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 — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
You know, we could maybe believe it's an organic carbon-based molecule, but we don't know which one it is yet.
So, you know, I mean, stay tuned.
I mean, I would never have thought the first evidence of life outside the Earth, like a really hard chemical scientific evidence, would be on a planet around another star.
I thought we'd maybe find it on Mars or on some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
But now with the James Webb Space Telescope and the telescopes that will come afterwards, we might be able to actually get enough of a sense of the atmosphere of these planets to start looking for life signs.
What are we using to detect that?
It's a technique called spectroscopy, and it's a really, really powerful thing.
This is what most scientists do.
As beautiful as images are of a gorgeous galaxy or a star, that's not really what we do.
We look at these little squiggly lines.
We get very excited.
We let the light from the star pass through a grating that actually draws it into a rainbow.
It takes that white light.
You've seen pictures of prism, dark side of the moon, Pink Floyd.
White light goes in, rainbow comes out.
If you measure really, really carefully how much light is coming in every color,
You can tell astounding things.
You can tell how hot the star is, how fast it's rotating, in some cases how far away a galaxy is.
That's how we measure how far away they are from us in space.
And you can measure the chemistry molecule by molecule.
Showing 241–260 of 1,835 · page 13 of 92
← Previous
Next →