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#90 An Australian backyard astronomer helped NASA find 100 planets! Astronomy award winner Chris Stockdale used his home observatory in Churchill, Victoria to track distant stars and find the planets in their orbit. What a chat.
Description
Chris Stockdale is an award winning astronomer in the Gippsland area of Australia. His contribution to NASA's exoplanet research earned him the Berenice and Arthur Page Medal from the Astronomical Society of Australia. And he's an amateur.
Chris uses an observatory in his own backyard to monitor candidate stars from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and studies their brightness over time. If the light dims by as little as half a percent, he's found another exoplanet, a planet that orbits a star in another part of the galaxy.
His exoplanet data also helps guide the James Webb Space Telescope, 1.5million km away in solar orbit. Incredible!
We had a chat with him about his observatory, NASA's TESS program, and some of the most fascinating planets in the solar system