Infinite Horizons: Oct. 18 Dr. Jian Ge: Searching for Earth 2.0s and Life in the Universe
Speaker: Dr. Jian Ge (Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
Oct. 18, 2023
4pm, Beijing time
Watch it on Zoom
"Are we alone?" has been a fundamental question since the dawn of civilization, and we have always been curious about the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Since the discovery of the first exoplanet, a hot Jupiter orbiting a sun-like star named 51 Peg, in 1995, the number of exoplanet detections has grown exponentially. To date, we have discovered over 5000 exoplanets, each with unique properties and characteristics that are often vastly different from our own planet. However, despite these great advancements, we have yet to discover another habitable Earth-sized planet orbiting a sun-like star - an Earth 2.0. The Earth 2.0 (ET) space mission has been designed to take advantage of a wide field, high precision photometer and a wide field microlensing telescope to monitor millions of stars in the Milky Way for detecting exoplanets. With the help of these technologies, ET is expected to detect approximately 30,000 new planets, including around 5000 Earth-sized planets, 10-20 Earth 2.0s, and approximately 40 free-floating Earth-mass planets. This data will allow us to accurately measure their occurrence rates and study their distribution and statistical properties. Additionally, the follow-up observations of some promising Earth 2.0s around very bright solar type stars may be able to detect biosignatures in their atmospheres. In this presentation, I will discuss the status of the project and new results from relevant research.
Meeting ID: 882 6473 7039
About the Speaker
Dr. Jian Ge is a chair professor of astronomy at Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He was a professor of Astronomy at the University of Florida in 2004-2020, an assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University in 2000-2004, and a postdoc research staff at Lawrence Livermore National Lab in 1998-2000. He received his PhD in astronomy from the University of Arizona in 1998 and his BSc in theoretical physics from the University of Science and Technology in 1989. He is the Principal Investigator of the Earth 2.0 space mission study at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. As the Principal Investigator for the Dharma Planet Survey and the MARVELS survey of the SDSS-III program, Dr. Ge and his team have made numerous discoveries, including the discovery of the Vulcan planet orbiting 40 Eridani A in 2018, as well as brown dwarfs, binaries, and various kinds of quasar absorbers.
