 Welcome to part two of the Habitable Zone Unplugged, a four-part conversation about exoplanet science with Dr. Robert Hertz and Dr. Johanna Teske. I'm Calico Field. So these planets in this solar system were, you know, invented for this episode and to illustrate these science points, but could planets like this exist? You know, is a system like this within the realm of possibility? Yes, I would say it's in the realm of possibility. We don't actually know the densities of many small exoplanets, but I actually did a little bit of background reading and one of the ones we do know the density of is LHS 1140B. It's in the habitable zone around its host star, so it seems to be the right temperature, but it's actually over twice as dense, we think, as the Earth. And so that's very similar to the planet that Robert envisioned in this case in the video. So Robert, you created the visuals for this episode and you've created a lot of visuals for NASA Press releases about, you know, real exoplanets, but these are things that we don't actually know a lot about that, you know, no one has really seen up close, so how do you create visuals about those things when we know so little about them? Well, this is very much art informed by science that we do it, right? When we go it trying to illustrate, say, a newly discovered exoplanet, there may be only two or three things we really know about it. Maybe it's size, how long it takes to orbit the star, maybe it's mass or not. And then there might be a handful of things that we can extrapolate from that based on theories and models, but everything else, right, that's guesswork. So when we want to illustrate something like that, we go in, we pick the core points that we know are true, maybe of the various models, one that maybe is most illustrative of what's interesting about this world, and then we make a piece of art that's consistent with that, but then, you know, fills in all the details. Audiences are very sophisticated in what they expect these days with all the beautiful sci-fi worlds. So we want to make something that still looks cool, but, you know, everything that we fill in, you can almost think of as an artistic hypothesis of a guess consistent with what we know, but, you know, may or may not hold up over time. Now, in the case of the habitable planets, you know, we got to make up which bullet points we wanted to illustrate in front because we're trying to really communicate some of these core ideas about habitability, but it's kind of the same process. So as a scientist, how do you feel about these visualizations and having to fill in those gaps and, you know, these artistic hypotheses? And be honest, I can take it. Yeah, so I'm also a sci-fi fan myself, and so I really like the idea of taking something, kind of the facts that we've measured that we think are true, but bringing an aspect of creativity to it that then is exciting for me as a scientist to look at and think about and think about how I might test those artistic hypotheses. And then also for people who aren't necessarily doing the measurements or who aren't scientists, it gets them excited about it, too. And I like getting people excited about the science I'm working on, so I'm all for it. And we do run the art past. I mean, you actually got to review some of the planet looks as we're developing this, and, you know, again, for press releases, we do the same thing. We do get the scientists' feedback before we finalize any of the looks. In our next video, we'll talk about the current state of exoplanet science and the surprising amount of information that astronomers can determine about distant worlds today.