The Centre for Planetary Sciences at UCL/Birkbeck is delighted to announce the next event in their free ‘Adventures in Planetary Science’ public engagement series ‘Exoplanets and the Ariel Mission – Searching for signatures of life on strange worlds’, taking place on Thursday 31st October, from 5:30pm GMT. This will be a virtual event held online with Zoom.

It is estimated that our own Milky Way Galaxy is home to at least 100 billion planets and, with over 5700 detected over the past few decades, these strange new worlds orbiting other stars have become an important and fascinating area of scientific study.  Join to hear from exoplanet and astrobiology experts about how we explore these alien planets and what they could reveal about the search for life beyond Earth. Since it’s Halloween, they’ll be sharing some details of the many “horrifyingly inhospitable” exoplanets discovered so far!  You can also dive a little deeper into the bewitching world of exoplanets by putting your questions to the panel during the Q&A following the talks.

The event will feature talks from Professor Giovanna Tinetti (UCL, Head of Astrophysics Group and Ariel Mission Science Lead), Dr Andrew Rushby (Birkbeck, Lecturer in Astrobiology and co-host of the ExoCast podcast), Alex Thompson (UCL, PhD researcher in exoplanets and founder of the Orbyts STAR programme) and Dr Gordon Yip (UCL, post doctoral researcher in exoplanets and machine learning techniques, Lead of the Ariel Data Challenge). Dr Catherine Regan (West Virginia University, post-doctoral researcher in planetary science and recent winner of the IoP Jocelyn Bell Burnell medal for exceptional early-career contributions to physics by a female physicist) will be the host for the evening.

Don’t miss out! Register for your free tickets on Eventbrite now:  https://CPS-exoplanets.eventbrite.co.uk

For further information about the event please see the event webpage.