NASA’s been finding all kind of cool things out in the depths of space recently, but today the agency is poised to announce something big. NASA will be presenting a new discovery live to the world at 1:00 PM EST, and they’ll be live streaming the entire news conference online. You can watch the entire event right here.
There’s only been small hints at exactly what the discovery is all about, but NASA has noted that it’s related to a “discovery beyond our solar system.” That means exoplanets — planets outside of our own little celestial neighborhood — are likely the main focus. Researchers have already made many exoplanet discoveries in recent months, finding “Super Earths” and “Hot Jupiters” by the handful, so if NASA thinks its new discovery is worthy of a press conference of its own, it must be pretty important.
According to Space.com, the conference will feature a total of five speakers, all of whom have job titles that confirm we’ll be hearing a lot of big words that we barely understand. The presser will feature:
Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA headquarters; Michaël Gillon, astronomer at the University of Liège in Belgium; Sean Carey, manager of NASA’s Spitzer Science Center at Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena; Nikole Lewis, astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore; and Sara Seager, professor of planetary science and physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The full report on NASA’s finding will be made available in the journal Nature at the same time as the press conference, so there will undoubtedly be plenty of juicy details to sink your scientific teeth into even after the news is out.
