Stripping down science, the naked scientists.

The Naked Scientists with me Ben Valsler.

This week I'm looking back at the year and beyond in astronomy in a show packed full of

super space science. We'll be hearing why antique

globes are important for understanding the history of science, how researchers are

looking for planets around other stars, and why a household nuisance is vital to astronomers.

We'll be exploring the distribution of dust in the solar system.

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This is the naked scientist and still to come we'll hear how researchers search for pulsars and why we need to lock people up in isolation for more than a year before we can consider a mission to Mars.

But first, how do we spot planets in the glare of their parent star?

Ben Oppenheimer is associate curator of astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History,

and he studies exoplanets and a type of failed star called Brown

dwarfs. Well there are a number of ways to detect these things. What I'm working on

is trying to see them directly. I want to see what these things look like. And when you're trying to actually

see a planet around a nearby star, you have this terrible problem that the star is many millions

to billions of times brighter than the planet. And so the planet will be lost in the glare of the star.

So what do you do? Well you can study these things indirectly which is largely how people have done this to date.

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