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Update: Due to last week's news regarding the status of the Kepler mission, we will be proposing a different program than previously announced for the November 13th SETI conference.
The SETI conferences are presented by the SETI Institute and SRI International.
A few days ago, NASA announced the end of Kepler's data collection. This is not the end of NASA's Kepler mission as there is still a significant amount of data to analyze, but an exciting phase of the mission, the beginning of a new era for the new field of research called "exoplanetary science", or the research and characterization of extra-solar planets and the life they might harbor.
Kepler is NASA's first mission to search for planets around other stars, called exoplanets. The first exoplanet was discovered just 20 years before its launch. Only a few hundred others were discovered at that time. Most of them are habitable and more like gas giants like Jupiter on Earth. Nearly ten years after the launch of Kepler, the spacecraft data have detected thousands of exoplanets, including a multitude of Earth size or less, and many at the right distance from their star for possibly support life. . Thanks to Kepler's data, we better understand two terms of the Drake equation that we had escaped for fifty-seven years – we now know that there are still more planets than stars in our galaxy and that a significant number of them might have the right conditions to be habitable.
Thanks to Kepler, we know that the Earth is not alone. The chances that humanity is not alone in the cosmos seem high. But there are still a lot of big terms to understand in this little Drake equation. Research will continue with new space telescopes such as TESS and the next generation of large space telescopes such as JWST.
We invited Natalie Batalha, professor at the University of California. Santa Cruz and Doug Caldwell, Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute, to discuss the state of the quest for exoplanets. What did we learn from the Kepler mission? What are the most exotic planetary systems discovered so far? What are the chances of finding an extraterrestrial life over the next decade with the help of new telescopes? These are the questions that will be addressed during our special SETI conference on the end of the Kepler probe on November 13 at 7pm at SRI International in Menlo Park, California. Join us for a special tribute to the Kepler spacecraft.
Natalie Batalha, Now a professor at the University of California Santa Cruz, was an astrophysicist at the NASA Ames Research Center and scientist of the project for NASA's Kepler mission. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Physics from the University of California (Berkeley) and a Ph.D. in Astrophysics from the University of Santa Cruz. Batalha began his career as a stellar spectroscopist, studying young stars similar to the sun. After a postdoctoral fellowship in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, she returned to California.
In 1999, inspired by the growing number of exoplanet discoveries, Batalha joined the team led by William Borucki of Ames, who was working on transit photometry, an emerging technology for searching for exoplanets. She has been involved in the Kepler mission since the proposal stage and has contributed to many aspects of science, ranging from studying stars to detecting and understanding the planets that they host. Batalha led the analysis that led to the discovery in 2011 of Kepler-10b, the first confirmation by the mission of a rocky planet outside our solar system. Today, she leads efforts to understand the global populations of the galaxy from Kepler's discoveries.
Batalha taught physics and astronomy for ten years in the classrooms of San Jose State University before joining the astrophysics branch of the space science division of the research center Ames of NASA. In 2011, she received a NASA Public Service Medal for her vision of Kepler's scientific communication to the public and for her outstanding leadership in coordinating Kepler's science team.
Doug Caldwell is a scientist from the SETI Institute, a co-investigator of the Kepler mission and a scientist specializing in Kepler mission instruments. Twenty years ago, astronomers could only speculate on whether the planets were trivial in the universe or so rare. Thanks to Kepler, the discovery of thousands of worlds around other stars has shown that planets revolve around most stars in our galaxy. But how many of these planets are the size of the Earth, or even the Earth? Doug is an expert on one of the most effective techniques for finding small worlds far beyond our solar system: looking for the dimming of a star caused by the passage from one planet to another. He participates in three transit experiences, including one at the South Pole. This antipodal environment is certainly a difficult environment for an observatory, but it offers long nights and a high altitude, ideal conditions to find the small hollow in the stellar brightness that betrays a planet. In addition, Doug is also a researcher in instruments for NASA's Kepler mission, an ambitious space telescope that has examined more than one hundred thousand stars and discovered thousands of planets, the smallest or smallest of which is Earth. Kepler's results prompted us not to ask if other lands are present, but to ask how can we search for these atmospheres and this life on these lands.
NOTE: Due to the popularity of SETI Talks events, tickets are often sold out. If you register to participate, be aware that you will not be able to come, please let us know, because we will then be able to open the places to others. You can email us at [email protected]. Thank you!
SETI conferences are held at the SRI Conference Center at 333 Ravenswood Avenue. Please enter Middlefield Road and follow the signs.
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SAVE THE DATE (S)!
Planning is underway for the upcoming SETI talks, but we may wish to set some dates:
December 18, 2018
January 16, 2019
February 13, 2019
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