June 7, 2019 8-10PM

Event Type: Lecture and Stargazing
Title: We Were The Discoverers: Witnessing the Exoplanet Revolution
Lecturer: Arpita Roy
Position: Burke Postdoctoral Fellow
Institution:Caltech
Abstract:
A scarce two decades ago, the idea of other worlds around other stars, inhabited by other beings, lived in the realms of philosophy and science fiction. And yet here we stand today, counting these distant planets in the thousands, and slowly peering down through their atmospheres to answer questions about their habitability. It is staggering to think that this exoplanet revolution is happening in our lifetimes — that we will be remembered as the generation that discovered other worlds. The question now becomes, will we also be the first ones to find life in the Universe beyond Earth?