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SUMMARY:Hunting for terrestrial planets transiting the most nearby very-lo
 w-mass stars and brown dwarfs - Michael Gillon (Liege University)
DTSTART:20131203T163000Z
DTEND:20131203T173000Z
UID:TALK47333@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:David Titterington
DESCRIPTION:After centuries of speculations\, the last twenty years have s
 een the discovery of hundreds of planets orbiting other stars.  This ‘ex
 polanet revolution’ has led to a real breakthrough in the history of sci
 ence.  It has revealed that most stars host planets\, and the billions of 
 terrestrial planets potentially able to host life exist in our Milky Way a
 lone.  To go one step further towards an answer to the tantalizing questio
 n “Are we alone?” we now have to detect habitable planets amenable to 
 the search for life signatures in their atmosphere with our current instru
 mentation.  In this respect\, the most promising targets are the coolest a
 nd smallest objects in the solar neighbourhood\, including not only very-l
 ow-mass stars but also ‘brown dwarfs’\, i.e. faint substellar objects 
 too low in mass to sustain the core nuclear reactions that define a star. 
  An Earth-sized planet eclipsing periodically one of the nearest of these 
 small celestial objects could be detected by a telescope of relatively mod
 est size\, and the atmospheric traces of life on its surface could be scru
 tinized by one of the giant telescopes currently in preparation.  Just fun
 ded by the European Research Council\, the project SPECULOOS aims to seize
  this first opportunity to detect life outside our solar system.  I will p
 resent here its instrumental concept\, its goals\, and its status.\n
LOCATION:Martin Ryle Seminar Room\, Kavli Institute
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