A+ Lecture “The quest for habitable exoplanets”
The Office for Development and Cooperation would like to invite you to the second lecture of the new edition of the “A+ Lectures” Programme.
The lecture will be held on 3 November 2021 (Wednesday) and will start at 7 p.m.. The event will be available through our ClickMeeting webinar platform and will be broadcast via our YouTube channel.
The lecture titled “The quest for habitable exoplanets” will be delivered by Dr. Michaël Gillon from the University of Liège as FNRS (Belgian national fund for scientific research) Senior Research Associate.
About the researcher
Michaël Gillon is a Belgian astrophysicist that works at the University of Liège as FNRS (Belgian national fund for scientific research) Senior Research Associate. His scientific studies are devoted to the detection of exoplanets and to their physical and chemical characterization.
He is the Principal Investigator of the exoplanets part of the TRAPPIST project, which has participated to the detection of more than one hundred transiting exoplanets, including the now famous exoplanetary system TRAPPIST-1. In 2007, he performed the first detection of the transit of an exoplanet similar to Neptune in terms of mass and radius. In 2010, he was the Principal Investigator of the project that made the first measurement of the thermal emission of a "super-Earth". Since 2012, he has been developing and leading the SPECULOOS project that targets nearby small stars to detect potentially habitable planets well-suited for detailed atmospheric studies, and whose main facility is hosted by the European Southern Observatory of Cerro Paranal in the Chilean Atacama Desert.
Michaël Gillon's studies of extrasolar worlds has been rewarded by numerous prizes and distinctions, including the prestigious Balzan and Francqui Prizes and a nomination in the list of the 100 most influential persons in the world by the Time magazine.
Abstract
Is there life elsewhere in the Universe? How do we detect exoplanets? How do we hope to find life on exoplanets light-years away? What is the contribution of Europe to this quest? What do exoplanets tell us about the famous "Fermi's Paradox"?
The Copernican Revolution taught us that our Earth, far from being the center of the Universe, is only one among the many planets orbiting the Sun, which is itself similar in every respect to the stars lining the celestial vault.
Later, astronomy revealed that there are hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way, our galaxy, and that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in our expanding Universe. Faced with such immensity, it is very tempting to hypothesize the existence of other inhabited planets out there, and even of more advanced civilizations.
Long confined to speculations, the existence of exoplanets, i.e. planets in orbit around other stars than the Sun, became a proven fact at the end of last century. Since then, more than 4000 exoplanets have been detected at an ever-accelerating pace. A few dozen of these are “potentially habitable”, i.e. they could be rocky worlds harboring oceans of water on their surface, like our Earth. Imagining complex forms of life on some of these planets is but a small step away, one that is happily crossed by science-fiction. But our imagination will eventually be replaced by real scientific measurements, as upcoming giant telescopes will soon be able to probe the atmospheric compositions of some of these extrasolar worlds, and, who knows, to reveal chemical traces of life out there. If so, our view of the Cosmos will change forever…
Moderator: Dr. Krzysztof Czart, European Southern Observatory (ESO)
Host: Professor Marek Łukasik, Vice Rector for Development and Cooperation, Pomeranian University in Słupsk
Join us through ClickMeeting platform:
https://akademiapomorska.clickmeeting.com/a-quest-for-habitable-exoplanets
YouTube: