Next Talk  - 6 April  2023 14:00 CEST

by Dr Anezina Solomonidou, Senior Scientist, Hellenic Space Center (HSC)

Title: Exploring the Ocean Worlds of the outer solar system: The search for life beyond Earth

Abstract

How do we search for life in other worlds, and what is the most promising place to find life beyond Earth? The 'biosignatures' point to some bodies in our outer solar system that are not planets, but satellites, with icy surfaces that host vast oceans beneath them. These are Jupiter’s Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto and Saturn’s Titan and Enceladus. After all, the story of oceans is the story of life itself as we know it. Earth is not the only oceanic world in our solar system. The oceans define our planet, since they cover most of the Earth's surface, and 'lead' the water cycle. But even deeper in our solar system, the story of the oceans continues in a much larger context that reaches the edges of the known Universe. The exotic satellites of the giant and gaseous planets of our own neighborhood through their complex geology, climate, and even atmosphere, which in the case of Titan resembles that of Earth, seem to hide great surprises. This began to be unveiled with the NASA and ESA missions Voyager 1 & 2, Galileo, and Cassini-Huygens, as well as ground-based and space-based telescopes.
Our views of these worlds are now expected to be significantly enhanced with the upcoming JUICE, Europa Clipper, and Dragonfly missions as well as JWST’s observations. We are only at the beginning of our exploration of these alien worlds, which have already begun to inform and enrich our understanding of life on Earth.

In this talk I will review recent results on distant AGN and proto-cluster demographics from deep, extragalactic X-ray surveys. I will then discuss the discovery space offered by next-generation X-ray imaging mission concepts, including ESA's (New)Athena, NASA's AXIS Probe, and finally the Survey and Time-domain Astrophysical Research eXplorer (STAR-X), selected by NASA for Phase A study.

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Next Talks in 2023

24 May 2023 15:00 CET  - Prof. Luciano Iess (Dipartimento di ingegneria meccanica e aerospaziale, Università La Sapienza, Rome, Italy)