The frontier of exoplanetary science: Towards the discovery of planets like our own 

The James Webb Space Telescope will allow astronomers to peer into the atmospheres of planets orbiting other stars in unprecedented detail. This new great observatory has already confirmed its first exoplanet and identified the presence of photochemistry on an alien world, but these discoveries are just beginning. We have never been closer to probing the atmospheric composition of rocky planets like Earth, which could potentially host habitable conditions and even life. This talk will provide an overview of recent exoplanet discoveries by the James Webb Space Telescope and the near and intermediate term efforts by astronomers and astrobiologists to locate and characterize potentially habitable worlds.

Speaker: Edward (Eddie) Schwieterman, Assistant Professor of Astrobiology