The Pursuit of Earth 2.0

Sunday,June 23.2024 7.00 pm

Humans have long speculated whether we are theonly form of life in the Universe. We are likely the generation that will witness the detection of first extraterrestrial biosignatures,either on planets or moons in our own Solar System,or on a remote planet around one of our neighboring stars. Prof. SharonWang will introduce astronomers’efforts in pursuits of finding Earth 2.0,earth-like planets around Sun-like stars, with the hope to find life in the form that we are familiar with some day,ideally within our lifetime.

Prof. Sharon Xuesong Wang is an astronomer working on the detection and characterization of extra-solar planets, especially planets that are similar to our Earth and Jupiter. She is a faculty member in the Department of Astronomy at Tsinghua University. She received her PhD from Penn State and was a Camegie Postdoc Fellow before joining Tsinghua in 2020. She's the Project Scientist for CHORUS, a high precision spectrograph being built by China that will search and characterize Earth-like planets in the solar neighborhood.