Exoplanets: The Quest for Strange New Worlds (live public talk)

Planets orbiting other stars, or exoplanets, have become an important field of astronomical study over the past two and a half decades. Recent findings from NASA's Kepler mission suggest that nearly every star you see in the night sky probably has exoplanets orbiting it. The number of confirmed exoplanets is now a few thousand. This talk will present a brief history of exoplanet discoveries, the story of the “super-Saturn” extrasolar ring system, and summarize NASA’s ongoing future plans to discover and characterize “strange new worlds.”

Speaker: Eric Mamajek, Deputy Program Chief Scientist, NASA Exoplanet Exploration Program, JPL