SETI Live

In this episode of SETI Live, Jeremy Webb joins Moiya McTier to discuss Life is But a Stream: The Distribution of Planetary Systems Along Stellar Streams and Their Properties.
Stellar streams are elongated structures of stars moving through the Milky Way, often shaped by tidal interactions and the galaxy's gravity. Jeremy Webb's research explores how planetary systems are distributed along these streams and what their properties can reveal about planet formation and evolution in dynamic galactic environments.
Together, they'll dive into how astronomers trace stellar streams, how planetary systems survive and evolve within them, and what this research tells us about the broader history of our galaxy.
Read the paper: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ae67fd

What happens when hundreds of thousands of volunteers team up with NASA to explore the sky? In the case of Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, thousands of new brown dwarfs.
NASA citizen scientists have helped discover more than 3,000 brown dwarfs, effectively doubling the known population of these mysterious objects over the past decade. These discoveries are helping astronomers better understand the boundary between planets and stars, revealing rare ultra-cool worlds, extreme T subdwarfs, and even brown dwarfs that may host aurorae.
Dr. Lauren Sgro and special guest Dr. Adam C. Schneider (United States Naval Observatory) discuss how citizen scientists made these discoveries, why brown dwarfs are so difficult to detect, and what this growing catalog is teaching us about our galactic neighborhood.
Press release: https://science.nasa.gov/get-involved/citizen-science/nasa-volunteers-double-known-population-of-brown-dwarfs/ 
Paper: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ae5b60 
Backyard Worlds: Planet 9: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/marckuchner/backyard-worlds-planet-9

What does intelligence sound like?
For decades, scientists studying whales and dolphins have uncovered remarkable evidence of sophisticated communication, social complexity, self-awareness, and cognition in cetaceans. Today, a new generation of research tools and analytical methods is opening an even deeper window into the sounds and possible language structures of these extraordinary marine mammals.
Join SETI Institute President and CEO Bill Diamond for a fascinating conversation with 2026 Drake Award recipient Dr. Lori Marino as they explore the cutting edge of dolphin and whale communication research, what these discoveries reveal about intelligence on Earth, and how they connect to broader questions at the heart of SETI.
Together they'll discuss:
 🔹 How scientists study whale and dolphin communication
 🔹 New breakthroughs in cetacean cognition research
 🔹 Whether dolphin and whale sounds may contain language-like structure
 🔹 The ethical and philosophical implications of understanding non-human intelligence
 🔹 What studying intelligence on Earth can teach us about detecting intelligence elsewhere in the universe
Dr. Lori Marino is a neuroscientist, expert in animal behavior and intelligence, and the 2026 recipient of the SETI Institute's Drake Award.
Read the announcement: https://www.seti.org/news/seti-institute-names-lori-marino-as-2026-drake-award-recipient/

How do you study volcanoes on a planet more than 200 light-years away?
Join us for SETI Live as host Moiya McTier talks with planetary scientist Claire Marie Guimond about the extreme lava world K2-141 b—a rocky exoplanet so hot that parts of its surface may be covered in oceans of molten rock.
Using advanced mantle convection models, Claire and her collaborators investigated how heat moves through the planet's interior and where volcanic hotspots may form—including on the planet's permanent nightside. Together, we'll explore what these models reveal about alien geology, how lava worlds compare to Earth, and what volcanism might mean for a planet's long-term evolution.
We'll also dive into how scientists can study volcanic activity on distant worlds, what makes lava planets important to planetary science, and what questions remain about one of the galaxy's most extreme exoplanets.
Paper: https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/547/3/stag390/8501203
(Recorded live 7 May 2026.)

A newly identified class of distant galaxies—nicknamed "little red dots"—may be doing something extraordinary: quietly creating the raw ingredients for life.
Join host Dr. Simon Steel as we explore groundbreaking new research from Dr. Remo Ruffini and Dr. Yu Wang from the International Center for Relativistic Astrophysics Network (ICRANet), suggesting that these compact, enigmatic galaxies could act as "molecular islands," forming complex organic molecules in environments surprisingly calm compared to the chaotic early universe.
- What makes these galaxies so special?
- How can such small, distant objects produce life's building blocks?
- And what does this mean for the possibility that life's chemistry is widespread across the cosmos?
We'll break down the science behind these "galactic oases," how they were discovered, and why they may reshape how we think about the origins of life in the universe.
Press release (pdf): https://www.icranet.org/LRDs-Molecular-Islands-Press-Release.pdf 
Paper: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ae3a76 
(Recorded live 30 April 2026.)