Truth is Stranger than Science Fiction – a NASA Scientist Tells

People speculated about the existence of planets orbiting other Suns for hundreds if not thousands of years before they were finally confirmed. That gap left a lot of time for science fiction writers to invent their own words – mysterious planets with exotic landscapes, orbiting alien star systems. When our technology finally caught up with our imaginations, what we found was even more extraordinary than we had imagined. As science curator at the NASA Exoplanet Archive, Dr Jessie Christiansen will take you on a tour of some of the more fantastic exoplanet discoveries, including some famous, fan-favourite fictional planets brought to life.

Astrophysicist Dr Jessie Christiansen has been called the “Tomb Raider of exoplanet research”. Working at the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech, Jessie searchers for, studies and catalogues extrasolar planets – plants orbiting other stars. Her main research focuses on using the thousands of exoplanets found by the NASA Kepler mission to determine how common Earth-like planets might be in our galaxy. She is currently working on the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) which will search the entire sky to discover even more planets beyond our solar system.