Profs & Pints Baltimore: The Search for Life Beyond Earth

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “The Search for Life Beyond Earth,” with Måns Holmberg, postdoctoral researcher at the Space Telescope Science Institute and part of a team of astronomers looking for chemical traces of life on distant exoplanets.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-life-beyond .]

Are we alone in the universe?

While many of us have pondered that question, astronomer Måns Holmberg of Baltimore’s Space Telescope Science Institute is seriously focused on answering it. In April he was part of a Cambridge-led team of astronomers who generated worldwide headlines by announcing that they had discovered potential evidence of a gas produced almost exclusively by life in the James Webb Space Telescope’s data from the atmosphere of a distant world.

You don’t need to journey any farther than Baltimore’s Guilford Hall to learn from Dr. Holmberg how the search for life elsewhere is being conducted and what strides are being made on that front. We’ll explore what it would take to confirm signs of life on such a world, what challenges remain, and how the next wave of observations could ultimately tip the scales.

Dr. Holmberg will look at the role being played by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), how it uses infrared light to decode the chemical composition of strange atmospheres, and how it has left us closer than ever to answering the question of whether life exists elsewhere.

He’ll discuss astronomers’ growing interest in a new class of exoplanets known as “Hycean worlds”—ocean-covered planets with hydrogen-rich atmospheres that could be surprisingly hospitable to life. We’ll visit K2-18 b, a distant world around twice the size of Earth that orbits in the habitable zone of a cool red-dwarf star 120 light-years away, and discuss why it has become one of the most interesting exoplanets in the search for life.

Recent observations from JWST have revealed something extraordinary: the atmosphere of planet K2-18 b contains carbon-based molecules like methane and carbon dioxide and possibly even dimethyl sulfide (DMS), a gas that, on Earth, is almost exclusively produced by life. Dr. Holmberg will what makes DMS a compelling (though not yet definitive) biosignature candidate.

You’ll emerge from the talk with a much richer appreciation of the immense possibilities out there among the stars. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Doors open at 5. The talk begins at 6:30.)

Image: An illustration showing what the exoplanet K2-18 b might look like. Source: NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI) / Wikimedia Commons