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Franck Marchis

Franck Marchis

Astronomer

Oct 26, 2026

Brian EdwardsCORRESPONDENT
26:53
How do you communicate with these people? Is there a big email that you're sending out to everybody to kind of say, point your telescopes here tonight? How do you organize this group of people to help with these observations?
27:04
So we used to do it by email, but then we quickly realized that it will not be durable.
27:10
So now we have a Slack channel, and we also have a website where people can see how to observe and what targets are observable from their location.
27:19
And this one, TOI-4465b, was definitely an interesting target because we were suspecting it was a Jupiter, a warm Jupiter.
27:28
So we have diagrams showing where it's located, what people can expect to see.
27:33
And then people start engaging with us and say, hey, we would like to observe it.
27:38
And it's extremely easy.
Brian EdwardsCORRESPONDENT
30:07
But why is it important to also have amateurs and lay people who are at telescopes, too, looking up at the sky?
9:45
Uh, but they were always kind of viewed as, uh, harbingers of doom.
9:49
Yeah, well, can you imagine you are, uh...
9:53
You don't have access to telescope, you don't really understand the physics behind it, and, uh, and suddenly you see a tiny point in the sky getting brighter and brighter over time, and then this tiny point start displaying a coma, then a tail.
10:11
And it's, it's not moving that fast for human being.
10:15
A comet is not like...
10:17
It's not, uh, it's not a meteor.
10:18
It can stays there for, like, weeks or months visible in the sky.

29 MINS LATER

39:30
Could you talk a bit about the modern tools that we're using here in the 2020s to study comets and objects like them?

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