GAC November Meeting with Samuel Beiler (TCD)
November 9 @ 7:30 pm - 9:30 pm
Galway Astronomy Club are pleased to announce details of our November club meeting, which will take place at 7.30 pm on Monday the 9th November in the Ardilaun Hotel, Taylors Hill, Galway.
Talk: ‘Phosphine Chemistry and the search for life’
Claims that signs of life have been detected in the universe have so far proved erroneous — but Dr Samuel Beiler, will focus on the careful scientific process that may eventually allow for such claims to be believable.
He will explore this through the lens of phosphine (PH3) — a molecule found on Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn, and controversially claimed to be a potential biosignature found on Venus. An expert in the on-going mystery of this molecule, Dr Beiler will describe new work from the James Webb Space Telescope which has opened a new chapter in the study of phosphine by looking at the coldest brown dwarfs. These objects, which fall in the grey area between planets and stars, act as ready-made celestial laboratories that have twice shattered our understanding of phosphine. Come and hear the twists and turns of scientific discovery and the open mysteries that still lie ahead of us.
Samuel is calling his talk “The Tangled Webb of Phosphine Chemistry, and why it matters in the search for life”.
Speaker: Samuel Beiler (TCD)
Samuel Beiler is a post-doctoral researcher at Trinity College Dublin, where he studies the dynamic atmospheres of brown dwarfs and exoplanets. He published some of the first brown dwarf observations from the James Webb Space Telescope, and is an expert in the on-going mystery of the molecule phosphine.