Royal Institution Public Talk - The quest for life beyond the solar system
Monday 27th October 2025 from 19:00pm to 20:30pm
The Royal Institution
21 Albermarle Street, London, London, W1S 4BS
Are we alone in the universe? This is one of the oldest and most primal questions of humankind.
But we may be closer to finding an answer, thanks to a recently-proposed new class of habitable exoplanets called Hycean worlds. Hycean planets are expected to be temperate ocean-covered worlds with H2-rich atmospheres, and thanks to their larger sizes and more extended atmospheres, compared to rocky planets of similar mass, Hycean worlds are significantly more accessible to atmospheric spectroscopy.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) recently observed the atmospheric spectrum of a possible Hycean world for the first time, named K2-18 b, which led to inferences of multiple carbon-bearing molecules in its atmosphere with hints of a potential biomarker.
Astrophysicist and exoplanet expert Nikku Madhusudhan will present the observations from K2-18b, and what they’ve taught us about the atmospheric composition and physical processes, along with the possibility of a habitable ocean underneath the atmosphere. Discover the latest future prospects in the search for habitable environments, and life beyond the solar system in the next decade.
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Mon 27th Oct
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