This is a science podcast for January 1st, 2026.

I'm Sarah Crespi.

First up in the new year, we're upping the image resolution of exoplanets.

Right now, other worlds appear as bright dots with no detail, giving us few clues about possible life or even consonants.

Staff writer Dan Cleary joins me to discuss a plan to create a giant telescope out of a fleet

of spacecraft to get a better look at exoplanets.

Next on the show, we have mathematicians Emily Real and Alex Kintrovich.

They talk about how hard it is to talk about math.

The complex concepts, jargon, and the slow pace of understanding proofs all add up to siloed subdisciplines and potentially more errors in the math literature. We talk about these communication troubles and some potential fixes.

Astronomers have spotted so many exoplanets. We're now talking more than 5,000.

And under just the right circumstances, when an exoplanet crosses in front of its star,

we might get some clues about the chemicals in its atmosphere as light passes through it.

And we can calculate if it's in what it's called the habitable zone around the star,

not too far, not too close.

Maybe it's a rocky planet.

There are a lot of things we can find out about these worlds.

Some of them might tell us about whether or not they could have life.

What we aren't going to be doing is taking pictures of the planet's surfaces,

visualizing possible oceans or continents or is it a green planet. This just isn't something

that we can see right now. This week in science, staff writer Daniel Clary wrote about a project

aiming to fix that. Hi, Dan. Welcome back to the podcast and happy New Year.

Oh, happy new year. It's nice to be here. We can't take pictures of the surface of an exoplanet.

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