"The Search for Habitable Worlds" David Latham, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Launched in April 2018, NASA’s TESS mission is monitoring more than 200,000 stars and is expected to discover thousands of planets orbiting these stars. Stars chosen for the TESS survey are bright, making their planets’ properties relatively easy to characterize. These properties——including compositions of planetary atmospheres——will help scientists identify possibly habitable planets. Habitable candidates will be studied further with large ground-based telescopes and the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2021. The TESS team announced its first exoplanet detection on September 16, and Dr. Latham’s talk will include a preview of early results from the mission.

This free lecture is presented by the Vermont Academy of Science and Engineering, and will be preceded by the presentation of VASE’s annual awards for Outstanding Teaching in Science to two teachers in Vermont schools