The Signiature of Life on Other Planets

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

We're making a guess at what spectroscopic signiature we're going to see, and we're really crossing our fingers that we understand chemistry and biology well enough. If the life exists, it's likely that we'll be able to observe it in just the right way to detect it. It's leaving the door open for the possibility. But what sits on the other side of that door? Just tons of technical challenges.

Recent years have seen a revolution in the study of exoplanets, planets that orbit stars other than the Sun (or don’t orbit stars at all). After a few tentative detections in the 1990s, dedicated instruments in the 2000s have now pushed the number of known exoplanets into the thousands, enough to begin to categorize their distribution and properties. Today’s guest is John Asher Johnson, one of the leaders in this field. We talk about the various different ways that exoplanets can be detected, what we know about them know, and what might happen in the future.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

John Asher Johnson received his Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently professor of astronomy at Harvard University. He is the founder and director of the Banneker Institute for summer undergraduate research. Among his awards are the Newton Lacy Pierce Prize from the American Astronomical Society. He is the author of How Do You Find an Exoplanet?

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.