Woods Lecture Series: Jessie Christiansen - The Search for Earth 2.0: Why We Think It Exists, and How We're Going to Find It

Dr. Jessie Christiansen comes to Shelton Auditorium on Wednesday, February 17, 2027, for a talk titled The Search for Earth 2.0: Why We Think It Exists, and How We're Going to Find It. It's part of the J. James Woods Lecture Series at Butler University, which brings mathematicians and scientists to the campus to talk about theories at the frontier of their fields and the technologies and public issues that go along with them.

Christiansen is the Chief Scientist of the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech/IPAC, where she searches for, characterizes, and catalogues planets orbiting other stars. She leads the NASA Exoplanet Archive and has worked on the Kepler, K2, and TESS missions to map exoplanet demographics and find the planetary systems closest to Earth. The goal there is to identify targets for further study with NASA's next flagship mission, the Habitable Worlds Observatory. She's also the Principal Investigator of SHERA, a new NASA mission concept called Searching for Habitable Exoplanets with Relative Astrometry.

Given that background, the talk is exactly what the title says: why astronomers believe there's another Earth-like planet out there and the actual work being done to track it down. It's a look at the search for another world that might look something like our own, and the specific missions and methods that make that search possible.

The talk starts at 7:30 PM at Shelton Auditorium, 4600 Sunset Ave, Indianapolis, IN 46208. It's free and open to the public, and no ticket is required.