326 | Natalie Batalha on What We Know and Will Learn About Exoplanets

Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. One of the things that I learned back in my undergraduate astronomy major days was when you have a telescope, what the telescope can do is defined in part by the telescope itself, you know, its light collecting power, its field of view, things like that, but very much by the instruments that you put at the other end of the telescope. The light comes in and then you detect certain features of the light. You could put a camera.

there, right? This is the obvious things where you get the pretty pictures from, from the Hubble Space Telescope or the James Webb Space Telescope. You could put a spectrograph there. This is a workhorse instrument for real astronomy. You look at the spectrum of light from distant objects.

You can detect redshifts using that and chemical compositions, all sorts of interesting things. Or you can just do a photometer. You know, when I was an undergraduate at Villanova, suburbs of Philadelphia, we had a telescope on the roof of the science building, and I would spend hours out there collecting data. There weren't enough photons that you could get in that particular environment to do precision spectroscopy or even imaging, but you could do photometry. All you're doing is measuring the brightness of the source at different moments of time.

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