Winter Solstice Lecture: Planetary Atmospheres and the Search for Signs of Life Beyond Earth

Name: Winter Solstice Lecture: Planetary Atmospheres and the Search for Signs of Life Beyond Earth
Start: 2024-12-14T19:00:00-05:00
Location: Hoag Auditorium

Schedule

Sat Dec 14 2024 at 07:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

Hoag Auditorium | Dahlonega, GA

For thousands of years, inspired by the star-filled dark night sky, people have wondered what lies beyond Earth. Today, the search for signs of life is a key factor in modern-day planetary exploration. Astronomers have found thousands of planets that orbit nearby stars, called “exoplanets”. NASA's James Webb Space telescope will enable us to study gases in rocky exoplanet atmospheres, including gases that might be attributed to life. Professor Sara Seager will share the latest advances in this revolutionary field.
Professor Sara Seager is from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her ground-breaking research ranges from the foundation of exoplanet atmospheres to innovative theories about life on other worlds to development of novel space mission concepts. She was the Deputy Science Director of the MIT-led NASA mission TESS; PI of the JPL-MIT CubeSat telescope ASTERIA that orbited Earth from 2017-2019; and has had numerous leadership roles in concept development for space-based direct imaging missions to discover another Earth. She currently leads the Morning Star Missions to Venus to search for signs of life or life itself in the Venus clouds. Her many accolades include a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, the 2024 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics, and has Asteroid 9729 named in her honor. She is the author of “The Smallest Lights in the Universe: A Memoir