"Habitability beyond our solar system"

Guest Speaker

Thursday, 28th July 2022 (19:45 - 22:00)

Venue: Virtual Meeting

What do the terms "habitability" and "habitable" mean? What do we mean by it? Do we even know what it means to be "habitable"? What are the difficulties in assessing whether or not something is habitable? Why are we looking in the locations that we are now? Are we looking in the correct locations, to begin with? I'll discuss current scientific thinking on these basic concerns, what motivates these ideas, and why answering these problems is so difficult for an astrophysicist like me.

Speaker: Prof. Christopher Watson

At Queen's University Belfast, Chris is a professor of exoplanets and low-mass stars. Prior to moving to Belfast in 2008, he spent almost ten years in his formal life at the University of Sheffield, where he earned a PhD and held fellowships and postdoctoral positions. He oversees the exoplanet group and is currently the Deputy Head of the School of Mathematics and Physics. He has authored more than 160 scientific papers and his research focuses on the identification and characterization of exoplanets, particularly the exploration of their atmospheres. One of the highlights was weighing Kepler-78b, the time's smallest exoplanet, among other things. This was a hellish "lava-world," equivalent in size and mass to the Earth, but with an orbital period of just over 8 hours! Building on this, he is now pushing to develop techniques that will allow true Earth-like planets to be discovered in the future.