Geoff Marcy: The Search for Exoplanets and Life Elsewhere in the Universe
The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss
Lawrence M. Krauss
4.4 • 592 Ratings
🗓️ 29 July 2022
⏱️ 113 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Geoff Marcy has been pioneer in the search for extra-solar system planets since the first discovery of an exoplanet surround a main sequence star was made in 1995 by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz. Within months, Marcy and his team had not only confirmed this result but detected numerous other exoplanets. Seventy of the first one hundred exoplanets were discovered by Marcy’s team, including the firs exoplanet located as far away from its star as Jupiter is to the Sun, and the first exoplanet discovered by observing its transit of its host star, a technique that will be used by JWST to explore the atmosphere of exoplanets to search for bio signatures. Marcy was then a Co-PI on the Kepler Mission, which discovered over 4000 exoplanets. For their pioneering work in the creation of this new field Marcy and Mayor shared the international Shaw Prize in 2005. More recently Marcy has turned his attention to methods to probe for intelligent life in the Universe, first as a PI on the Breakthrough Listen Project, and more recently exploring novel methods, including optical techniques to probe for possible signals of intelligence elsewhere.
We discussed all of these exciting topics, as well as Geoff’s own origins as a scientist in a thoughtful and fascinating discussion. He has become well known not just as a world renown scientist, but as one of the best communicators of astronomy there is. Our discussion will give a whole new dimension to your thinking about that age-old question: Are we alone in the Universe?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, I'm Lawrence Krause and welcome to the Origins Podcast. |
| 0:12.0 | On the last podcast that we aired, Andy Noel and I discussed the first four billion years of life on Earth. |
| 0:18.0 | Addressing questions of how life affected the Earth, the geology of the |
| 0:21.7 | Earth, and vice versa. Clearly important questions to try and understand the origin of life |
| 0:26.4 | and its interaction with our planet, which address the more foundational question, perhaps, |
| 0:32.3 | of is it possible that life originated not just here on Earth, but elsewhere, either elsewhere in our solar system on other planets or maybe moons of planets. |
| 0:42.3 | Equally important, what's the likelihood that life developed elsewhere in the universe on extra solar planets around distant stars? |
| 0:49.3 | Clearly, one of the prime developments that have affected that whole search was the discovery of extra solar planets. |
| 0:55.0 | The first extrasolar planet was discovered by Michel Maure and Didier Cuolos, |
| 1:00.0 | and then immediately followed up by the discovery of other extra solar planets by Jeff Marcy and his team, |
| 1:06.0 | who discovered 70 of the first 100 extra solar planets, including the first extrasolar planet located more than 5 AU from its star about the distance of our current gas giant planets in our solar system. |
| 1:19.6 | And equally important, the discovery of the first planet that transited its star and dimmed the light of its star. |
| 1:26.6 | Now, the two techniques that have been used to discover extra solar planets, |
| 1:29.3 | looking at the Doppler shift as the star moves in response to the motion of planets around it, |
| 1:36.3 | and this transiting technique were spearheaded by Marcy. |
| 1:40.3 | And for his work in that regard, along with the discovery of extra solar planets, he and |
| 1:44.7 | Meyer won the International Shaw Prize in astronomy. Marcy went on to be one of the co-PIs on the Kepler |
| 1:57.5 | satellite mission, which discovered over 4,000 extra solar planets. |
| 2:02.6 | And after that, he's also addressed, in fact, another issue that's relevant to understanding |
| 2:07.4 | life in the universe, the possibly of intelligent life in the universe, the search for |
| 2:13.0 | intelligent life for in the universe. And he was a principal investigator on the Breakthrough Listen program |
| 2:18.3 | and more recently has considered the interesting question of whether we might use visible signals |
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