This is John Batchel. Hotel Mars with my colleague David Livingston. We spoke to two MIT astronomers,

Avi Schbor and Mark Hahn, about a discovery and what it was like to make that discovery. What Mark saw

and what Avi helped him understand. That moment itself.

They discovered what?

A disintegrating planet, 140 light years away,

disintegrating because it's an 11-hour rotation around the sun.

And the heat is melting the planet and turning the ground into liquid and then

vaporizing it. And then it's, because it's a little planet, it can't hold that the atmosphere

that's created out of the melted, vaporized rock which escapes into space.

The planet's disintegrating.

About a Mount Everest every day,

it'll take a couple of million years to completely evaporate.

But what I was interested in is what Mark saw the moment he discovered this anomaly,

this odd-looking, what he says, signal, that's astronomer talk for data.

Signal.

Here's Mark to explain.

Science is always uncertain, always hesitates, always doubts.

Come back, come back, come back, come back, look, look.

This is a real astronomer, talking to a real astronomer

about what it's like to be at the frontier of information about the cosmos.

Very exciting.

Mark Hart.

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