What could the future of deep space exploration look like?

Imagine looking ahead 10 years down the line and being able to say, that bright star here has a planet like the Earth that might have life.

It's Tuesday August 6th and you're listening to Science Friday.

I'm Seyfry producer D. Peter Peter Schmidt. One of the hottest fields in astronomy right now is the hunt for exoplanets.

NASA has found close to 6,000 of them, and more discoveries are on the way. The European Space Agency is building an exoplanets spotting satellite called Plato, which stands for the planetary transits and oscillations of stars planned to launch in late 2026. It'll be looking for exoplanets specific of build on what we've already found and what new things could it discover?

Here's guest has Charles Berkquist with more.

Joining me to answer some of these questions is one of the scientists working on the telescope,

Dr. Suzanne Agrane, Professor of Astrophysics at Oxford University.

Welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you for having me.

So, fill me in, what exactly is this whole mission about?

So Plato is a satellite which will carry 26 small

telescopes which will all stare in roughly the same direction and

together they will monitor as you mentioned 200,000 stars and they will

monitor their brightness and they will then discover planets using the transit

method which is when a planet passes in front of its host star

it hides a very tiny fraction of the light from that host star so we see the brightness

of the star briefly dip by a very small amount.

That allows us to discover planets in orbit around distant stars, provided that their

orbit is aligned along with our line of sight.

And Plato will not only do this, but it will also monitor the intrinsic brightness variations

in the stars that it observes and that includes oscillations of stars if you

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