Meeting the Neighbors: Characterizing Planetary Systems Orbiting Nearby Stars

Speaker: Courtney Dressing (UC Berkeley) In Person and zoom

Zoom Recording Passcode: $sQqq?F3

In roughly 15 years, NASA will launch the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), a “super-sized” version of today’s extremely accomplished Hubble Space Telescope. HWO will conduct a broad range of astrophysical investigations and dramatically improve our knowledge of the universe. One of the driving goals of HWO is searching for signs of life on planets orbiting other stars. In preparation for this exciting search, my group has been conducting a comprehensive investigation of the nearby stars that could be searched for planets – and life – by HWO. We are refining the properties of nearby stars and planetary systems, assessing the sensitivity of past searches for planets, searching for additional planets, and investigating which stars are most likely to host potentially habitable planets. I will take us on a tour of our neighborhood in the Milky Way galaxy, sharing the properties of nearby planetary systems, discussing our ongoing investigations of those systems, revealing “imposter Earths” that could be mistaken for potentially Earth-like planets, and identifying the most favorable targets for future life detection observations with HWO.