SETI Live

What can a visitor from another star system teach us about our own cosmic neighborhood?
Join host Dr. Franck Marchis and guest Dr. Cecilia Tubiana (INAF) for a conversation about interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS and the surprising observations made by ESA's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) during its rare close encounter with this ancient traveler.
In November 2025, Juice turned five of its instruments toward 3I/ATLAS, capturing a once-in-a-lifetime dataset as the comet passed through the Solar System. From massive water vapor outgassing to tails stretching millions of kilometers into space, the observations are helping scientists better understand what this object is made of, how it behaves near the Sun, and what it can tell us about planetary systems beyond our own.
We'll talk about:
• how Juice managed to observe 3I/ATLAS while en route to Jupiter
• what scientists learned about the comet's water, dust, and composition
• why this interstellar object looks surprisingly familiar—and why that's exciting
• how these observations support planetary defense and future spacecraft science
• what 3I/ATLAS may reveal about the early history of the Milky Way
Press release: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Juice/Five_things_Juice_has_revealed_about_Comet_3I_ATLAS

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.)