Exil planets are planets outside of the solar system.

And we know today for the first time ever, with statistical certainty, that there are

more planets in the Milky Way galaxy than there are stars.

Each star hosts at least one planet.

That's astronomer and astrophysicist Munaza Alam.

For centuries, philosophers had been postulating that there are many worlds out there in the

universe, many of which are like our own.

Today, as part of our scientific work on exoplanets, she uses data from the Hubble and James

Webb Space Telescopes, the Manakaya Observatories in Hawaii, and the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.

So centuries ago, when Galileo was looking at the moons of Jupiter through his telescopes,

he was looking through the eyepiece of those instruments.

Today, we are using much more powerful telescopes at national observatories that are the

size of a school bus.

And so we aren't looking through the eyepieces of those instruments, but instead, we are

operating several computers that are connected to the telescope and what's called the telescope

control room.

And that is how we control where the telescope is pointing, what it's looking at, and for

how long.

I'm Dobar Adalon and you're listening to Overheard, a show where we eavesdrop on the wild

conversations we have here at Natuio and follow them to the edges of our big, weird, beautiful

world.

This week, our guest is National Geographic Explorer, Munaza Alam, a postdoctoral researcher

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