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Searching through the stars: finding Earth 2.0
17th October 2022 @ 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm
Dr Marina Lafarga-Magro of the University of Warwick will discuss her work searching for habitable exoplanets, and why it matters.
Are we alone? The idea of life beyond Earth has fascinated and inspired humanity for millenia. However, it was only three decades ago that the first planets outside of our own solar system were discovered. Since then, the number of these extra-solar planets, more commonly known as exoplanets, has increased to over 5000. All these exoplanets that are found orbiting stars other than our Sun are extremely diverse. We have found extremely hot planets where it rains iron, puffy planets with very low densities, and frozen icy planets. So far, we have not found anything resembling our own solar system.
Despite having found and studied over 5000 of them, exoplanets can rarely be observed directly. Their host stars are too bright and outshine any light coming from the planet itself. Moreover, most of them are too far for our telescopes to resolve them. Therefore, to detect these exoplanets, we rely on looking for changes in the light coming from their host stars. In this talk, I will explain how we are able to find and characterise exoplanets indirectly. I will focus on the two most successful methods used so far, namely, the transit photometry and the Doppler spectroscopy methods. After going through the basic concepts behind these two techniques, I will explain how we are getting close to finding an Earth 2.0, and why this matters.
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