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Podcaster: Beth Johnson, Franck Marchis, and Simon Steel (alternate hosts); Guest: Colby Ostberg

Title: SETI Live: Volcanism on Exoplanets – New Insights from JWST and Beyond

Organization: SETI Institute

Link: https://sites.libsyn.com/462636 ; Preprint of the paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.05566.pdf

Description:

Up until now, the quest to find evidence of active volcanism on other worlds has been limited to our own solar system. We’ve definitively seen volcanoes erupting on Jupiter’s moon, Io; we’ve possibly found evidence of geologically recent volcanism on Venus; and Mars has the largest volcano, although dormant, in Olympus Mons. With the advent of the JWST era, however, more possibilities have opened up. Colby Ostberg is an astronomer at UC Riverside and the lead author of an intriguing recent study on terrestrial exoplanet atmospheres and their potential volcanic activities, focusing on the direct imaging of such exoplanets.

Dr. Marchis and Colby discuss the results of the article, including the implication of volcanic activity on the color of an exoplanet and its atmospheric composition. Discover the future of exoplanetary science, where we’re heading in our quest to understand these distant worlds, and how advances in technology and telescopic observations are bringing us closer to answers. (Recorded live on 5 October 2023.)

Preprint of the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.15972

Bio: Beth Johnson is a communications specialist and social media manager with a degree in physics and master’s work in planetary science. She specializes in meteor showers, icy moons, and anything with volcanoes.

Franck Marchis is a senior planetary astronomer and chair of the exoplanet group at the Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute and Chief Scientific Officer and Founder at Unistellar. He has dedicated his work to the study of our solar system, specifically the search for asteroids with moons, using mainly ground-based telescopes equipped with adaptive optics.

Simon Steel is Deputy Director of the Carl Sagan Center for Research at the SETI Institute. As an observational astrophysicist, he specialized in optical spectrophotometry, with an interest in the star formation histories of galaxies.

Colby Ostberg is an astronomer at UC Riverside and the lead author of an intriguing recent study on terrestrial exoplanet atmospheres and their potential volcanic activities, focusing on the direct imaging of such exoplanets.

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