Monday, November 17, 2025 at 3:30 pm

JILA auditorium

Kevin France, CU Boulder

"Blazing the Trails to Habitable Planets: Over the Experimental > Mountains and Across the Observational Deserts"

Abstract:

The discovery of thousands of planets orbiting stars beyond the solar system has fundamentally shifted our view of Earth’s place in the Universe, has captivated the public imagination, and has transformed research priorities in astrophysics. We are now actively searching for atmospheres on temperate, terrestrial planets, and are developing the technical tools to find and characterize “Earth-2.0”. The goal of understanding the frequency and diversity of habitable (and inhabited) planets requires a `full system approach’ where we bring to bear multiple techniques for exoplanetary observation and a detailed understanding of the evolving stellar environments in which they live.

In this talk, I will present an overview of the multiple paths in our search for inhabited planets, from current efforts to find temperate planets with stable atmospheres around red dwarf stars to future detection of true Earth-Sun analogs with NASA’s upcoming Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO). I will summarize recent progress and open questions in understanding the key stellar environmental variables that influence exoplanet atmospheres, focusing on observational and experimental work to characterize the high-energy photon and particle radiation that dominates atmospheric escape on rocky planets. I will conclude with a short overview of the upcoming HWO mission, current opportunities for the community to engage with the mission development, and the path to launch in the ~2040 timeframe.

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