Friends Of Europe Podcasts

17 May 2023: In this episode of the Dark Matter Podcast, join Germain Garreau and Kaustubh Hakim, two researchers who detect and study exoplanets – or planets that orbit a star outside our solar system. The podcast details their new techniques and nulling interferometry , which involves using several small telescopes instead of one large one. However, reaching near-perfect symmetry between the beams of each telescope is a challenge. The podcast also delves into how scientists today can infer the chemical composition of exoplanets from a distance and a question that has many in the scientific community entranced: can we use bio-markers like the detection of ozone to tell us whether there is life outside our solar system? Germain Garreau is an engineer in optics and photonics at Grenoble INP-Phelma (France) and KTH (Sweden), and a PhD student at the Institute of Astronomy of KU Leuven. His work on instrumentation is dedicated to pushing the limits of exoplanet’s imaging and their characterisation using inter