This is CBSI in the world, I'm John Bachelor with David Livingston of this space show, Dr.

Space himself, and this is Hotel Mars, and we're conversing with Dr. Jackie Farrity

of the American Museum of Natural History, talking about star systems in position to look

at us after we, while the sun transits, while the Earth transits the sun.

However, Dr. Farrity is also involved in research in a project called Gaia to search for exoplanets.

First, Jackie, what is Gaia, and what have you done?

Yeah, so, it was also a major, Gaia was a major component to our paper.

Gaia is an observatory that is currently in orbit around the Earth, which is orbit around

about a million miles away, and the European Space Agency has launched it and is maintaining it,

and what it is, is the single greatest mapping mission of our time, of any human time, really.

And Gaia has provided for us the distances and motions of almost two billion stars,

stars that are close-by, stars that are far away, stars that are very, very safe,

stars that are bright, meaning high-mass stars, low-mass stars.

It's really provided for us a brand-new lens on looking at the very precise nature of our galaxy and beyond.

All of astrophysics really does depend on the measurements that Gaia is putting out.

So, what I use Gaia for is essentially everything I do in astrophysics.

I use it to look for stars that are moving with other stars.

I use it to look for the star formation history of our nearby galaxy,

and then what we used it for here was to look at maybe exoplanet host stars that might have entered

or exit advantage point that could see Earth as a transiting planet.

So, one of the things that I've found right away when the catalog was released.

So, on April, April 18th, I think it was April, 18th or April 24th,

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