INTERNATIONAL NEWS - NASA is holding a press conference on Wednesday, 22 February, to present new discoveries around planets that orbit stars other than our sun, known as exoplanets.
The event will air live on NASA Television and the agency’s website. The details of these findings are embargoed by the journal Nature until 1 p.m EST time.
The press conference will take place at the agency’s Headquarters at 300 E Street SW in Washington. Provisions have been made for media unable to attend in person. They may ask questions by telephone or ask questions during the briefing on Twitter using the hashtag #askNASA.
There will be many experts at the briefing including Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, Michael Gillon, astronomer at the University of Liege in Belgium, Sean Carey, manager of NASA’s Spitzer Science Center at Caltech/IPAC, Pasadena, California, Nikole Lewis, astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and Sara Seager, professor of planetary science and physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.
A Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) about exoplanets will be held following the briefing at 3 p.m. with scientists available to answer questions in English and Spanish.
NASA also recently invited the public to help search for possible undiscovered worlds in the outer reaches of our solar system and in neighboring interstellar space. A new website, called Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, lets everyone participate in the search by viewing brief movies made from images captured by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission. The movies highlight objects that have gradually moved across the sky.
