welcome to the science for the public lecture series science for the public is an organization committed to bringing science information and issues to the general public visit our website for our program good evening i mean vonn step for science for the public and i welcome you to contemporary science issues and innovations tonight tonight we learn how exoplanets how astrophysicist locate them and especially how they analyze exo atmospheres our guest to explain that is mercedes lopez morales an astrophysicist at the harvard smithsonian center for astrophysics and also this year a fellow at the redcliffe institute for advance study dr lopez morrall is research is focused on the development of new techniques to study the atmospheres of earth like planets this is very challenging work and she's here to explain what she and other astro physicists have so far discovered dr lopez moralists was born in spain and did her undergraduate work there she received her ph d in astronomy from the university of north carolina at chapel hill then was a carnegie post doctoral post doctoral fellow and hubble fellow at the carnegie institution for science in washington d c before returning to spain as a researcher at the spanish national research councils institute of space study and says in barcelona and twelve she joined the harvard smithsonian center for astrophysics where she's been involved in several international exoplanet projects including the access project that's an acronym of which she is the principal investigator and the upcoming nasa transitting exoplanet survey satellite called tess she will describe these missions tonight it is a very special pleasure to welcome her sadie's lopez what determines whether you can have an atmosphere on some body of it in space the main thing i would say is what the mass of the planet is and i'm talking atmosphere to get an atmosphere there are kind of two stages there one that grabs it from outer space one it's emitted from inside the the planet or whatever then something is going to happen to evolve so we were talking a little while ago the that if if if you had looked at the earth's atmosphere you know in the year two when it was two billion years old or something you would say well forget that plagues or so it has changed radically  very beginning we didn't have a lot of folks in floating around and this is just based on you know study or frocks like like ancient rocks that don't show a lot of oxygen so the own set of like having all the folks  radiation that early and we believe that you know at that point was when life started to get out of the oceans because you know at that point they could come out and that u v radiation with and kill them that's very interesting and that would lead to possible to have exciting era here where you're first of all nobody believed the people who were brave enough to go looking for exoplanets i remember that very well the poor things were just you know ridiculed now there are hundreds of these planets and now you are on the frontier looking at the atmospheres the exo atmospheres so can you tell like us like what what's how do you find them that first of all how do you locate a better on so for that you need to do to follow up of those planets with which at the beginning they are just candidates and then you do follow up with ground based instrumentation which measure the wobble of it with this so you then you have these ways of kind of collecting this data and then analyzing and you can really be quite sure you can talk about the mass which is amazing considering there are so remote and little compared to the stars so that's quite safe that's quite something so can we go to these ground based telescopes and you use  a lot i think for checking this out one thing i'd like to insert in that is that we understand that astronomy data is just norm the measurements that you know in some sense not only tell you about the physics of the planet itself but it puts our solar system in context thinking ahead of time of the how seami solar system so what's weird about our solar system that don't have that or is it because this is what you can perceive at this time no i think it's well you know if we also can measure dips you know the transits of things that seem to be the same size of earth ok so we don't know what why those planets success but whatever the physics is behind that i mean they are easy to one part you know hundred thousand sometimes one part in a million that gets absorbed and but we we are we are learning how to do it yet we have for jupiters you know in speak coming through that's quite amazing that you can catch it well let's go to what you're doing so we talked about the access which you can explain just in and and tests is forthcoming and stuff demands we have in two places and that the whole idea of this project is to get a set of about thirty planets with all kind of slices like from jupiter to super earth because we haven't found an earth yet and tr up the entire sky with portions of the sky actually might be in them every two months and it's going to look for these little tiny translates but it's going to be so sensitive that they will be able to tell us you know if there is an earth like planet there and that so at that point based on the results from would we we would have our kind of at least you know we would have our favorite targets and we would go into the next generation of those groups because the  line but that is going to take about three years or so so in another decade or so it's just it seems like so many miserable things are happening to the earth but this is a nice kind of upbeat white interesting yes so there of these technological advances are going to open up a whole realm there are there any particular challenges that are like overwhelming  that at the end of the day you know i think that we need to do the ground based because the resources are larger i mean we would have many telescopes to do this while in space at least in the next two or three they kates we right i'd like to ask you about the international aspect of this it seems like a lot of science is headed toward big collaboration what generates that what motivates their there are another reason is funding you can get funding from many places and you can build a bigger project that you know if you only have funding from from one place and another reason although a little bit less important  but from the science point of view is actually critical is that if you have many many people working on one project they can double check each other's results because we don't want to make a mistake you many nations to participate in many institutions to purge pate which is altogether healthier and in some of these things like the joke at cern for example the large hadron collider is that mortal enemies are able to work many many reasons that i was trying to explain but you also have to have competition you know everybody can work together truth is that the ideas go on the one way yes so yeah like you know at least at least you know where it is standing doors we have maybe like three different groups that don't work together each one of those groups he said you know it's an international collaboration on itself but we just check each other all kinds of mentalities over in the world some countries like germany for example i mean it's very clear to them that they have to put money into although you probably go and talk to a german person and they would tell you that they don't have you know you know a country like the u s there is like you know general mentality the science is good but it's not just generalized that you know us it could be yeah i noticed yes and  so you know it could be even better i mean we're we're we're in a very strong position but i can no even imagine how much better we would be if you know people were more committed to ours given funding to do exactly  know month of like things that you get out of signs and things that actually help you know humanity as a whole to move forward you know i can just think of like the cure for cancer you know which has nothing to do with what they do but if you put more money into that they're into you would find it exactly and so in general you know yeah i think we were struggling with funding i mean right now you know in the in the current economy i guess that every single e many many stages throughout the evolution of so you know any form of life it's life you know it doesn't have to be in that it can fly right so the chances but tyria or you know any any kind of life developing elsewhere in the universe i would say one hundred percent ok you're very optimistic you're waiting yeah i'm just waiting to see and and then you know at the same time i'm trying to be really humble and think we we really need to learn what we what to expect because right now we only know how life on earth you we only know what they by a signature says we called a planet like earth accelerated so much in a few decades really and when you think about it wasn't that terribly long ago when they were still talking about the earth is the center of the universe and there are no galaxies and so on you  audience and let them talk to you i'd like to get a little bit of background if you don't mind the how did you get into this field did you just grow up this way it was no it was a little bit by i you know i ended up in carnegie where they work the next of planets and they just you just called my and my attention and then from that point you know it only takes like a little bit of thinking and you know just i don't know i don't even know how to yes and you know everybody has to find a purpose yeah you know for life so my purpose is one of three to be you know going to be to try to find another planet like earth but i'm i know that it purposely i don't care that in the mean time you know that's what i'm working on but it's very interesting that you didn't start out with that sort of that were more interested in that say the technical the engineering and was that it to that it's true i hope that you have a wonderful year at the rad and as you already mentioned since it's right down the street from your workplace at the center for us for physics sometimes you're not as a  unlucky fellows are at the radcliffe where they do their fellows year but in any case i hope you have a wonderful time there and that we really appreciate your coming in and some pleasure telling us all about this i will know you know we're sort of neighborhood they have found quite a few new ones and they still think that there are more than one hundred missing but otherwise you know they actually start at the hasn't changed  it really depends at one point yeah yeah it really depends at what point are there in the formation of earth the comet actually hit the earth so if there is a time when i wish i have two questions conclusion from those observations was that they were being produced by organisms and those two elements along could be a see like a signature of life and that's what they were what we should be looking for another planet  there are a few recent results that come can explain how oxygen forms we thought having life and this is just destiny just because you know young let's say in its first billion or two years of existence there's a lot of geological processes going on that maybe could even pop oxygen into the atmosphere of a lifeless planet somehow if it wasn't there to begin with but when you get up around say a planet that's four or five billion years old are you saying you can imagine a scenario where oxygen o two is reactive as it is could continue to exist on a planet with no biological well i appreciate that clarification and i also have a question just generally speaking if you haven't if you had mentioned you had a solar system with two rocky planets it could be earth size or super earth whatever  here that it would be easy it would be easier for you to get a more precise spectral analysis of the harder one even if the two planets were chemically similar just because there's more excitation of the molecules in the atmosphere the atmosphere of off the planet might have been blown away by by the radiation coming from the star although some serious tell you that the planet my preserve and atmosphere but it's going to be then so meaning that only the heavy morning those who want to stay in their lives or you know want to close or a chemical elements are going to be blown away so it is a catch twenty two because he's easier to collect data for those planets but maybe the atmosphere