I'm John Batchel. This is Hotel Mars. David Livingston, Dr. Space, is here, my colleague and co-host and co-pilot,

and we're off to Planetary Formation Theory of. We welcome Professor Paul Callis. He's at the University

of California at Berkeley, and he's also in Nature Magazine and Science Magazine. And

congratulations, Paul. This is exciting. Thank you very much. I'm very glad to be

here. Good morning. You are an astronomer of great note because you've evidenced something that is

helpful to understand where we came from. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, you've observed the

activity around a star called formal hotel Hott, HOT system.

What have you seen and what does it tell us about where we came from?

Thank you, Paul.

Well, yeah, I study planetary systems around other stars.

We call them extrasolar planets and Fomalalhot is a bright star in the night sky.

You can see it with your naked eye.

And it's these bright stars that are very close to the sun.

And because they're so close, we can study them in great detail.

But they present a problem, and that is the star is too bright for us to

see any planets right next to them. So we have techniques to essentially cancel the starlight

or create an artificial eclipse of the star so that once we cancel the starlight, we can see the planetary system around it.

And that's what I do with the Hubble Space Telescope. And in fact, my background here shows

formal hot. One thing it doesn't show is the star itself. This big black disc is where we're

canceling the starlight. But once you do that,

and you can also do it from ground-based observatories as well, what you see is the planetary

system around the star. And here we see a big dust belt around Fomelhot, which is only 25 light years away, which astronomers consider in our backyard, in our neighborhood, the solar neighborhood.

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