Are There Planets Like Earth Around Other Stars? Part Deux
In 2006, Alan Boss presented the first lecture in the Neighborhood Lecture Series, with the title "Are There Planets Like Earth Around Other Stars?"
Nearly two decades later, Boss returns to this existential puzzle, summarizing the extent to which this question has been answered so far, and outlining the next steps in detecting and studying Earth-like exoplanets. Major new astronomical telescopes will be required to solve the puzzle, ranging from Carnegie's Giant Magellan Telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, to NASA's anticipated space telescope, the Habitable Worlds Observatory.
Meet Alan Boss
Alan Boss is a theorist and an observational astronomer at the Carnegie Science Earth and Planets Laboratory. His theoretical work focuses on the formation of binary and multiple stars, triggered collapse of the presolar cloud that eventually made the Solar System, mixing and transport processes in protoplanetary disks, and the formation of gas giant and ice giant protoplanets. His observational works centers on the Carnegie Astrometric Planet Search project, which has been underway for the last decade at Carnegie's Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.
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