HYBRID – General Meeting – March 2025

Presentation: 

The number of known exoplanets (planets outside the Solar System) grows daily. Over the past few decades, dedicated missions using both ground and space telescopes have discovered over 5,000 exoplanets, many of which seem unlike anything in our own Solar System. While such discovery missions aren’t new, our ability to study these worlds in detail has only recently been enabled by the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in late 2021. Over the past four years, JWST has opened powerful new windows into the atmospheres of extra-solar worlds, yielding unexpected findings and a richer understanding of the diversity of planets in the Milky Way Galaxy. Matthew Murphy will share a few of the most exciting recent discoveries about exoplanet atmospheres by JWST, led by a world-wide team of researchers, including Murphy and others at the University of Arizona. These include what appears to be a new class of planet, nonexistent in our own Solar System. In addition to these discoveries, JWST’s unique power enables researchers to peer into exoplanet atmospheres along new dimensions, and better comprehend their complexity. Matthew will tell the exciting story of how this works, and the discovery his team made as a result on a planet (WASP-107b) considered ‘strange’ to us. 

Biography: 

Matthew Murphy is a PhD candidate at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory. His work is dedicated to observing and studying the atmospheres of planets beyond our Solar System. Matthew is an expert in using the largest and most powerful telescopes around the world and in space, including the Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope. He has published several scientific articles making new discoveries about exoplanets. Matthew will be graduating with his PhD later this year. He earned his Bachelor’s degree from Stony Brook University in 2020. 

Caption: Artist’s illustration of exoplanet WASP-107b

Artist: Rachael Amaro/University of Arizona