There are a lot of variables in the Drake equation, many of which we don't yet have hard numbers for.

But in the last few decades, we've made huge strides in learning about at least one of those variables.

The fraction of stars with planets, what we call exoplanets, which, as a reminder, are simply planets orbiting stars that are not our sun.

For this bonus episode of Wild Thing, I speak with Sarah Seeger, who has spent much of her

career at the leading edge of the search for exoplanets. She's an astrophysicist and a professor

at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and she has always been fascinated by the night sky.

We like to say the night sky is for everyone. This summer, I was so lucky, I actually got to see

the truly dark sky. It was incredible. We were actually out in Idaho for a couple weeks,

and it's just stunning, absolutely stunning. But those stars out there, I've always wondered,

like, what is out there? What can possibly be there in that, like, huge, vast kind of wilderness of the night sky?

And when I got older, I actually realized I could be an astronomer for a job.

And that job involved math and physics and the night sky.

And I was just absolutely thrilled.

And when you started working in this field, exoplanets were more of,

they were kind of an idea, they were, you know, they were hypothesis, but they weren't really

concrete, correct? More or less, I started in the mid-1990s. So the planet 51 Peg had been

discovered and announced already. And that planet, the Nobel Prize in 2019, was awarded to that

discovery. But at the time, a lot of people didn't believe it. There were a few exoplanets

published in the literature by the time I started, but there were a huge number of skeptics,

far more skeptics than there were planets. Tell me a little bit more about Peg B because I just sort of know of it.

I don't know a lot of the details.

Sure.

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