SkyMapper

There's a southern thread, too.

Besides Paranal, the team's brightness measurements draw on SkyMapper, the survey telescope run by the Australian National University at Siding Spring.

The star sits at about minus 14 degrees declination, so it's reachable from both hemispheres.

Though at around magnitude 17, it's a job for serious telescopes.

Hi, my name is Franck Marchis.

I'm an astronomer at the SETI Institute, Director of Citizen Science, Chief Science Officer at UniStellar and Chief Executive Officer at SkyMapper.

Frank, so we just finished hearing from Clare Higgs at Vera Rubin, and Molly talked with her about the literally massive images that the observatory is compiling of the night sky.

And we brought you on to talk telescopes as well, but we're hoping we can talk a little bit more specifically about a certain object, that being the exoplanet, I believe it's TOI-4465b, a very compelling name.

Well, Franck, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today.

Thank you for having me.

Frank Marchese is an astronomer and director of citizen science at the SETI Institute and the chief science officer of Unistellar, as well as the chief executive officer at SkyMapper.

So, Seth, Frank mentioned the important role that a Jupiter-like planet has in preserving liquid water on a terrestrial planet.

Is that primarily from the Teide Observatory, or are you incorporating data from other places?

Right now it's from the Teide Observatory, but we are now working on incorporating other published data, ATLAS, Sloan, uh, SkyMapper, and so far so, and everything that is published Uh, we want to include it so we can create or we can analyze objects with a longer baseline of data and also compare with different surveys.

There is also an option that we want to include is that, uh, users are allowed to upload their own data so they can compare with the existing databases.

So one of the problems we have now is that when we are observing an object and we want to compare with other databases, we have to go there and, uh, go to the MPC and download the data and look for Atlas or photometry and download it and then try to merge.

And the southern footnote, hunting the oldest stars is something Australia does well.

In twenty fourteen, the ANU's SkyMapper telescope at Siding Spring found one of the most iron-poor stars known, and its chemistry was also explained by a low-energy supernova.

Same lesson, be careful what you build on one strange star.

Next story today.