This is TBSI and the World. I'm John Bachelor Hotel Mars, episode N.

With David Livingston, Dr. Space of the Space Show, my colleague and co-host and co-pilot, and we're very, very

pleased to be joined by Assistant Professor of Astronomy at the Physics and Astronomy Department

of Amherst College, Kate Follett, to take us on a tour of the

Galaxy of the solar system plus the Galaxy, 370 light years away, to an exoplanet around a star entitled

PDS 70.

We're looking at a real image here, and I leave it to the professor to describe what it is we

think we're seeing. Okay a very good evening to you thank you for this professor

the Alma telescope has given us an image that is strikingly

geometric, a ring within a ring within a ring. What are we looking at and what is

the excitement over a dust cloud around one of these little dots.

Good evening to you.

Good question.

So what we see here in radio light is a ring of dust around a very young star. These

rings we see fairly frequently around young stars and they're basically the remnants of the star formation

process and the the raw material for planet formation. One thing that you know we've noted is that when stars are very young the discs of material around them are like a pancake so they're continuous all the way down to the star.

Whereas there's a certain class of discs that I've been particularly

interested in in my career called transitional discs that have a bite out of the

middle of the pancake, a hole in the middle, so they look more like a donut than a pancake.

And BDS 70 is one of these systems.

So I would say there are many, many radio images

that the Alma Telescope has achieved

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