The LIUniverse with Dr. Charles Liu
Apr 11, 2026 · 48 min · 11 segments
How do we find exoplanets? What is the Milky Way’s “Thick Disk” and what makes it so special? To find out, Dr. Charles Liu and co-host Allen Liu welcome Harvard astronomer Dr. Victoria DiTomasso, who…
Victoria DiTomassoGuest
Charles LiuHostAllen LiuHost
excellent stuff okay to be to be discussed can't wait that's wonderful thank you victoria but for now of course we are going to look at today's joyfully cool cosmic thing uh the cosmically cool joyful thing of the day uh is specifically in honor of victoria's uh exoplanetary expertise a paper that was just recently published about a planet outside our solar system.
Now, you were saying that the star's name and then followed by the letter B indicates that it's a planet that orbits the star.
this star is named after Bernard Teegarden, who is a retired astronomer with NASA who discovered the star, which is super cool.
But we haven't been able to get enough detailed information by observing it to understand whether or not it can support life or has an ecosystem that is similar to Earth's.
This is true for basically every planet, right, Victoria? I mean, there's nothing that we can do yet that can really definitively tell us, you know, is there ocean, for example, or is there an atmosphere like ours? Although we might soon.
But what happened is that even though we can't figure it out observationally yet, it is possible to use computer simulations or detailed calculations using various inputs and laws of physics and things like that to see whether or not there's a possibility or to make predictions about whether or not this object is possibly a habitable, in which case then you follow it up in the future to take a look and see whether or not you can find it, right? So I'm excited to read this paper because Teegarden star B, if these folks who did these computational calculations are correct, then indeed the amount of sun energy that it gets from its star is about 10% more than we're getting here on earth.
And that means that it might just barely not be too hot for life like ours to develop on it.
But, you know, I want to defer to you, Victoria, to tell us from your perspective, these kinds of models, how excited should we get about them? Like, how cool really are they in your opinion? Yeah.
So I'm an observational astronomer, so I work with data and I don't work with models as often.
And so as Charles, as you were saying, there are things that we can't observe right now.
excellent stuff okay to be to be discussed can't wait that's wonderful thank you victoria but for now of course we are going to look at today's joyfully cool cosmic thing uh the cosmically cool joyful thing of the day uh is specifically in honor of victoria's uh exoplanetary expertise a paper that was just recently published about a planet outside our solar system.
Now, you were saying that the star's name and then followed by the letter B indicates that it's a planet that orbits the star.
this star is named after Bernard Teegarden, who is a retired astronomer with NASA who discovered the star, which is super cool.
But we haven't been able to get enough detailed information by observing it to understand whether or not it can support life or has an ecosystem that is similar to Earth's.
This is true for basically every planet, right, Victoria? I mean, there's nothing that we can do yet that can really definitively tell us, you know, is there ocean, for example, or is there an atmosphere like ours? Although we might soon.
But what happened is that even though we can't figure it out observationally yet, it is possible to use computer simulations or detailed calculations using various inputs and laws of physics and things like that to see whether or not there's a possibility or to make predictions about whether or not this object is possibly a habitable, in which case then you follow it up in the future to take a look and see whether or not you can find it, right? So I'm excited to read this paper because Teegarden star B, if these folks who did these computational calculations are correct, then indeed the amount of sun energy that it gets from its star is about 10% more than we're getting here on earth.
And that means that it might just barely not be too hot for life like ours to develop on it.
But, you know, I want to defer to you, Victoria, to tell us from your perspective, these kinds of models, how excited should we get about them? Like, how cool really are they in your opinion? Yeah.
So I'm an observational astronomer, so I work with data and I don't work with models as often.
And so as Charles, as you were saying, there are things that we can't observe right now.
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