Colours from Earth: preparing for exo-earth characterisation

Physics Colloquium 6th March 2015 deliverd by Robert Fosbury Having orchestrated and obtained the Voyager 1 spacecraft’s 1990 “Portrait of the Planets”, which looked back some 6.1 billion km towards its launch site, Carl Sagan coined the iconic name the “Pale Blue Dot” for our home planet. Since that time, nearly 2000 extrasolar planets have been discovered and, due to the developing sensitivity of the discovery methods, an increasing fraction of these are classified as ‘terrestrial’ and a few even reside within the habitable zone around their parent star. We can anticipate the time, perhaps with the next generation of telescopes on the ground and in space, that we can find and begin to investigate a planet that resembles Earth: “Earth’s twin”. Until then, we can hone our observational strategies by observing the Earth itself as an exoplanet and, along the way, see our world from a more holistic standpoint. There are ways in which we can exploit our moon as a proxy observer to gain some very practical experience.

Om Podcasten

The Department of Physics public lecture series. An exciting series of lectures about the research at Oxford Physics take place throughout the academic year. Looking at topics diverse as the creation of the universe to the science of climate change. Features episodes previously published as: (1) 'Oxford Physics Alumni': "Informal interviews with physics alumni at events, lectures and other alumni related activities." (2) 'Physics and Philosophy: Arguments, Experiments and a Few Things in Between': "A series which explores some of the links between physics and philosophy, two of the most fundamental ways with which we try to answer our questions about the world around us. A number of the most pertinent topics which bridge the disciplines are discussed - the nature of space and time, the unpredictable results of quantum mechanics and their surprising consequences and perhaps most fundamentally, the nature of the mind and how far science can go towards explaining and understanding it. Featuring interviews with Dr. Christopher Palmer, Prof. Frank Arntzenius, Prof. Vlatko Vedral, Dr. David Wallace and Prof. Roger Penrose."