Monday, April 14, 2025 at 3:30 pm

JILA auditorium

Victoria Meadows, University of Washington

"Leveraging Ground- and Space-based Facilities to Search for Signs of Habitability and Life on Exoplanets"

Abstract:

The search for signs of life on other worlds is an exciting quest that is now a key priority in both the Astro2020 and planetary science decadals. In the exoplanet context, biosignatures are potentially- detectable impacts of life on a global planetary environment, such as gases released by metabolic processes. However, all biosignatures must be interpreted in the context of their planetary environment, to rule out planetary processes such as volcanism and photochemistry that may enhance, destroy or mimic a targeted biosignature. Consequently, to determine if a biosignature is more or less likely to be due to life, a broad range of information on planetary and stellar properties and processes must also be acquired. Depending on wavelength range, size, and whether ground- or space-based, different telescopes will be capable of advancing the search for life in different ways, ultimately providing synergistic pieces of a much larger puzzle. In the near- term, the search for habitability and life on exoplanets will focus exclusively on M dwarf exoplanets, which, due to the coevolution with their star, may undergo a very different evolutionary path than that of our own Earth. These searches will be undertaken using low-medium resolution transmission spectroscopy with JWST, and high-resolution spectroscopy with ground-based telescopes. In the longer term, the NASA flagship large-aperture space-based telescope, the Habitable Worlds Observatory, will use direct imaging techniques to obtain reflected light from planets orbiting a broader swath of more Sun-like FGK host stars, to study their atmospheres and surfaces. In this talk I will briefly outline the potential capabilities for biosignature searches using high-resolution spectroscopy with ground-based telescopes and low resolution spectroscopy with JWST, and I will place these opportunities in the context of what might be possible with space-based telescopes over the next two decades.

Back to Speakers