First Parish Bedford UU

“New Planets Everywhere, and What They Mean” with Alan MacRobert.

Since 1995, astronomers have found 415 planets orbiting stars beyond the Sun. They’re big and  little, hot and cold, gas giants, quasi-Neptunes, and “super-Earths,” with all sorts of  unexpected characteristics. Alan MacRobert, a senior editor of Sky & Telescope magazine and First Parish’s  resident astronomer, has been covering these discoveries from the start. He will tell what we’ve been finding out and how – and what the catalog of known planets, as it stands at the moment, tells  us about the nature of worlds throughout the universe.