With the James Webb Telescope bringing striking images of early galaxies and planets, a new moonshot likely on the horizon and remarkable sounds from inside a black hole, it’s an exciting time for space exploration. A new revealing memoir tells the story of the 13.6-billion-year-old Milky Way – its life in the universe, the birth and death of stars and the push and pull of dark energy – from the galaxy’s own perspective.

Author Moiya McTier (@goastromo), an astrophysicist and folklorist, will join us to discuss what we’re learning about space this year, her love of planets, the history and future of the Milky Way and Earth’s place in it, and what it’s like to tell the galaxy’s tale, in its own style. Her book is The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy.

01GB2S090BPKEH5HB9NEAHN59X-1024x576.jpeg" alt="" width="640" height="360">What exoplanet WASP-39 b could look like, based on current understanding of the planet, which shows unambiguous evidence for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. (NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI))

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NPR NASA’s James Webb telescope has taken new images of Jupiter’s moons, rings and more “The telescope uses a camera with three filters that can map out infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye, to colors on the visible spectrum.”

The New York Times telescope-wasp-exoplanet.html">Webb Telescope Sees a Carbon Dioxide Atmosphere Way Out There “…a team of astrophysicists using the new telescope to probe exoplanets added to what has been a cavalcade of discoveries when they announced that they had detected carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of an exoplanet for the first time.”