To look for atmospheres around planets outside our solar system is to look for extraterrestrial life. Astronomist Sebastian Zieba used data from the James Webb Space Telescope to study small rocky exoplanets but found no aliens yet. However, his findings are still very interesting for future observations. Zieba graduated cum laude on 25 June.
‘The holy grail is always to find traces of life’, Sebastian Zieba says, affiliated with Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg and Leiden Observatory. ‘But we’re not yet able to detect some form of life directly.’ We need to figure out what planets besides the Earth are good hosts for atmospheres, and by extension, life. That’s what Sebastian’s research encompasses: searching for atmospheres around rocky exoplanets. These are planets outside our solar system that are smaller than two times the radius of the Earth and dominated by rock.
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