Zachory Berta-Thompson

Every star in the sky is a Sun, just like our own, and astronomers recently determined that most of those stars have planets. Some of these “exoplanets” eclipse their stars as seen from Earth, causing momentary dips in the stars’ brightness. Zach Berta-Thompson uses small telescopes to search for new exoplanets by watching for these dips (he helped find a few!), and he uses big telescopes to study these exoplanets’ atmospheres (particularly, the color of their sunsets). He is a professor of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder.