PHYSICS & ASTRONOMY Department
— Special Undergraduate LevelTalk —
Date: Tuesday, 1st May 2012
Time: 10:30 a.m.
Location: Physics & Astronomy Seminar Room 22
Dr. Jean-Michel Désert
Harvard College Observatory
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA)
“Searching for signatures of life in the atmospheres of habitable exoplanets”
ABSTRACT
Biosignatures are the signs of life in the atmosphere of an exoplanet. On the Earth, the main biosignatures are oxygen, which is produced only in large quantities by plants and photosynthetic bacteria, and ozone, which is produced photochemically in the atmosphere from oxygen. Transiting extrasolar planets currently offer the best configuration in which to investigate their atmospheres and to search for remote signatures of life on these worlds. I will present the outstanding challenges, both technically and observationally, that we will need to overcome in order to probe rocky exoplanet atmospheres orbiting in the habitable zone of their parent stars, with the ultimate goal of detecting the planets’ biosignatures.