Starts With A Bang Podcast #47 — Ice Giants At The Solar System’s Edge

What makes Uranus and Neptune-like worlds so fascinating? If you only knew.

What do we really know, and what mysteries are left to solve, about the outer worlds of our Solar System, and about the gas giant and ice giant worlds found throughout the Universe? Remarkably, if you had asked this same question 30 years ago, we would have had a quaint story about how planets form and why our Solar System has the planets it does, and we assumed that these rules would be extended to all solar systems in the galaxy and Universe. But with the deluge of exoplanet data, accompanied by better observations and simulations of our Solar System, that old story isn’t even the half of it.

I’m so lucky to get to interview Heidi Hammel for this edition of the podcast, who, as a bonus, was the lead investigator on the Hubble Space telescope when Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacted Jupiter back in 1994! Come listen to one of my favorite interviews ever today!

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