Over the last five years, we’ve gone from knowing only a handful of planets around other stars to having detected over 3,000. These exoplanets provide us with an opportunity to understand how planets and their atmospheres evolve, but most of them are too close to their bright parent stars for us to be able to directly study them. Instead, we infer their presence when they pass in front of the star and block some of the starlight. A tiny fraction of the starlight is filtered through the planet’s atmosphere, emerging with a fingerprint of the atmospheric structure and composition, and we can observe this using the Hubble Space Telescope and future observatories such as the James Webb Space Telescope and ARIEL. Joanna explains how we are using these measurements to start to build a picture of how planetary atmospheres vary under different conditions.

Guest: Joanna Barstow, University College London Host: NUCLIO – Núcleo Interactivo de Astronomia https://nuclio.org/

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Europlanet 2020 RI received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 654208.