Welcome speeches by Co-Directors of the Munich Center for Geoastronomy

• Yan Lavallée
• Kevin Heng

Room: A 140

To See a World in a Point of Light: The Past, Present, and Future of Exoplanet Detection

• Joshua Winn (Princeton University, U.S.A)

Room: A 140 A distant star appears as a single point of light - yet hidden within that light can be the signatures of an entire planetary system, if you know how to look. Astronomers have found thousands of planets by measuring tiny shifts, dips, and blips in the light from distant stars, using techniques that range from simple geometry and optics to Einstein’s general theory of relativity. This lecture will explain the main detection methods, describe some of the surprising planetary systems they have revealed, and look ahead to the next phase of discovery.

Volcanic Outgassing Across Time and Space

• Marie Edmonds (Cambridge University, U.K.)

Room: A 140 Volcanic degassing is the principal mechanism for the transfer of volatiles from the interior of a planet to its surface. In this talk I will discuss the role that volcanoes play, over geological time and across our solar system, in the development of atmospheres, in regulating climate and in the delivery of elements to the planetary surface that are critical for life.

Searching for Alien Earths

• Lisa Kaltenegger (Cornell University and Carl Sagan Institute, U.S.A)

Room: A 140 For thousands of years, humans have wondered whether we're alone in the cosmos. Now, for the first time, we have the technology to investigate. But once you look for life elsewhere, you realize it is not so simple. How do you find it over cosmic distances? What actually is life? As founding director of Cornell University's Carl Sagan Institute, astrophysicist Lisa Kaltenegger has built a team of tenacious scientists from many disciplines to create a specialized toolkit to find life on faraway worlds. Using our homeworld as a Rosetta Stone, the biggest space telescopes, creatively analyzing Earth's history and its astonishing biosphere to inform this search we discover not merely new continents, like the explorers of old, but whole new worlds circling other stars and how we could spot life there. Worlds from where aliens may even be gazing back at us. What if we're not alone?

The First Minerals and Rocks of the Solar System

• Mark Chaussidon (Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris - IPGP, France)

Room: A 140 One of the major unknowns regarding the early evolution of the solar system is how the first solids and rocks formed from the initial mixture of gas and dust inherited from the parent molecular cloud. Clues are provided by combining observations of the mineralogical, chemical, and isotopic composition of the components of primitive meteorites with astrophysical models of the accretion disk.

Bridging Stars to Planets: Geoastronomy with Brown Dwarfs

• Adam Burgasser (University of California San Diego, U.S.A)

Room: A 140 Between the highest-mass planets and lowest-mass stars, there exists a liminal population of brown dwarfs. Co-discovered with the first extrasolar planets, these objects have diverse formation channels and planetary-like atmospheres. In this talk, I describe how modern studies of brown dwarfs require deep connections between stellar and planetary science, from formation to evolution to atmospheric processes; and discuss how this science will help us to better understand the origin and evolution of our broader Milky Way.