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A Conversation with the Stars

Did you know that astronomers found thousands of planets orbiting around other stars than our sun? Come to the planetarium and explore these alien worlds with Dr. Marie Ygouf! Together you will learn how exoplanets form, how far away they are, what they might look like, and how we discover them.

Dr. Marie Ygouf is an astrophysicist working on planets that orbit other stars (not our sun). These objects, also called exoplanets, are extremely difficult to image for two main reasons: 1) they are situated further than 10 thousands of billion kilometers from us and 2) they emit several billion times less light than their host stars. Taking a picture of a planet around a star at such distances is equivalent to spot a mosquito close to a lighthouse at a distance of several hundred of kilometers. This requires state-of-the art telescopes that block the light from the star and innovative techniques of post-processing to extract the light from the planet. Maries work consists in improving the performance of telescopes for exoplanet science. She is currently preparing observations of exoplanets with the future NASA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) project (Hubble Space Telescope successor) that will be launched in space in 2021. JWST will help us to better understand the atmosphere of exoplanets, which is the first step to find evidence of extraterrestrial life.