Discovery of an orbiting pulsar in 1974 led to increasingly precise measurements that firmly established the existence of of gravitational radiation in the amount and with the properties first predicted by Albert Einstein. Join Dr. Taylor as he describes the torturous path from a theory published in 1915 to the detection of gravitational waves a hundred years later, with many fascinating developments along the way.

The Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) will be NASA's next flagship mission to follow James Webb. Roughly a quarter of WFIRST's primary mission will be spent conducting an exoplanet microlensing survey. The survey will provide a statistical assay of the cold exoplanet population with masses greater than that of Mars and orbits beyond ~1 AU, with a total planet yield comparable to Kepler's.

1I/'Oumuamua is the first interstellar interloper to have been detected. Because planetesimal formation and ejection of predominantly icy objects are common by-products of the star and planet formation processes, we address whether 1I/'Oumuamua could be representative of this background population of ejected objects. To do so, we compare the mass density of interstellar objects inferred from its detection to that expected from planetesimal disks under two scenarios: circumstellar disks around single stars and wide binaries, and circumbinary disks around tight binaries.