Eike Guenther from the Landessternwarte Tautenburg will hold a public outreach talk on the topic of exoplanet diversity at the Zeiss-Planetarium Jena. The talk will take place Wednesday, 02nd November, at 7:00 p.m., as well as Saturday, 19th November at 4:00 p.m., and will be in German.
“30 years ago, we only knew the planets in our Solar System: In the inner part, the rocky planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, further out the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn, and all the way out there the ice giants Uranus and Neptune. These are joined by comets and Asteroids. Astronomers assumed it as self-evident that all planetary systems would look like ours.
But nature taught us something different: Our solar system is only one of many possibilities. There are more kinds of plnaets and the planet systems’ architecture is often very different from our own. Nature is obviously richer than we had thought.
Since 2017, as part of a DFG priority program, a group of researchers is studying how diverse planets can be and why there are so many kinds of planetary systems. Is it possibly that our Solar System is an exception, ore are there many systems like ours? Are planets like Earth rare, or are they a dime a dozen? Now, the first answers to these questions have arrived.”
More information about tickets and reservations can be found here (German).