Understanding Brown Dwarfs and Exoplanets

In 2020, the YSES-1 system became the first directly imaged multiplanetary system around a Sun-like star. It features two giant exoplanets orbiting a star just 16 million years old. Now, the James Webb Space Telescope is revealing new insights into these distant worlds. Host Sarah Al-Ahmed speaks with Kielan Hoch, Giacconi Fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute and principal investigator of the JWST program that captured these observations, and Emily Rickman, ESA science operations scientist at STScI and member of the JWST Telescope Scientist Team for coronagraphy. They explore what makes this system so unusual, including a dusty circumplanetary disk around YSES-1b and high-altitude silicate clouds in the atmosphere of YSES-1c.

Later in the show, Bruce Betts joins for What’s Up to talk about how future telescopes like the Habitable Worlds Observatory could help us image smaller, colder, and older planets.

Discover more at:  https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/2025-yses-1

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