XXXVIII Trobades Científiques de la Mediterrània - Josep Miquel Vidal

6 Nov 2023, 12:30 → 8 Nov 2023, 19:00 Europe/Paris

Com va sorgir i evolucionar la vida, des de la creació d'elements pesants en supernoves com la que va originar la nebulosa del Cranc, fins a la vida que trobem avui en un lloc com una platja de Menorca?

 

La celebració de les XXXVIII Trobades de la Mediterrània: Vida a l'Univers, formació i evolució del Sistema Solar, i exoplanetes tindrà lloc a l'Insititut Menorquí d'Estudis a Maó els dies 6, 7 i 8 de novembre de 2023.

Gairebé 30 anys després del descobriment del primer exoplaneta, hem detectat més de 5000 exoplanetes i hem caracteritzat la seva distribució en massa, radi, període orbital i excentricitat en un ampli rang d'aquests paràmetres. La composició atmosfèrica dels exoplanetes detectats en trànsits sobre la seva estrella s'estan analitzant cada cop amb més detall, gràcies entre altres a les noves observacions espectroscòpiques amb el nou telescopi espacial JWST.

 

Al mateix temps, la vida en el Sistema Solar pot cercar-se en diversos cossos que contenen aigua líquida en el seu interior, en concret a Mart i alguns satèl·lits de Júpiter i Saturn, així com en petits asteroides o satèl·lits sòlids que puguin contenir evidència fòssil sobre els inicis de la vida en els seus gels interns. Així doncs, aspectes clau sobre l'origen i prevalença de la vida a l'Univers podrien descobrir-se en un futur no gaire llunyà.

 

L'objectiu d'aquesta trobada és reunir investigadors actius en un ampli ventall d'àrees científiques relacionades amb la recerca de vida al Sistema Solar i més enllà; l'origen del Sistema Solar i l'estudi dels meteorits, cometes i exocometes; i la caracterització d'exoplanetes on diversos organismes vius podrien aparèixer en una varietat d'entorns i condicions ambientals a l'Univers.

 

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Cartell TCM 2023 Català.pdf

Cartell TCM 2023 English.pdf

Right of information and data processing.docx

Monday 6 November

1 Benvinguda i presentació

2 Towards prebiotic chemistry in the interstellar medium

In the past decade, Astrochemistry has witnessed an impressive increase in the number of detections of complex organic molecules. Some of these species are of prebiotic interest such as glycolaldehyde, the simplest sugar, or amino acetonitrile, a possible

precursor of glycine. Recently, we have reported the detection of several new complex organic species in the interstellar medium, such as hydroxylamine, ethanolamine and n-
propanol, known to be intermediate species in the formation process of ribonucleotides

and phospholipids within theories for the origin of life. In this talk, I will present our recent efforts to establish whether key precursors of prebiotic systems chemistry can be found in space, and I will show how we can tackle searches with future instrumentation such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).

Speaker: Izaskun Jiménez-Serra

13:30 Dinar

Comunicacions contribuïdes

3 Habitable planets in the solar neighbourhood

Decades of radial velocity and transit searches have led to a reasonably complete
picture of the planets in the solar neighbourhood. We know of planets around 50% of
nearby stars and, interestingly, most of them are of terrestrial nature, highlighting the very high occurrence rate (more than 1 planet per star on average). A number of such planets orbit within the habitable zones of their stars, therefore with the potential to have surface liquid water and, perhaps, sustain a biosphere. The CARMENES instrument, mounted on the 3.5-m telescope of the Calar Alto observatory in Almer ́ıa, Spain, has been a major contributor to performing such complete census of our planetary vicinity. In this talk, I will provide a description of the distribution of known nearby exoplanets, with particular emphasis on those that are similar to Earth. I will describe the instrumentation that has led to this knowledge and also provide an outlook of future prospects for atmospheric characterisation and eventual search for biosignatures.

Speaker: Ignasi Ribas

4 Revealing nearby Earth-mass planets with ESPRESSO

During last decade there have been a tremendous increase in detection and
characterization of low-mass exoplanets, reaching the Earth size and mass domain.
ESPRESSO is an ultra-stable high-resolution spectrograph, developed by institutions
from Switzerland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and ESO, located in the combined Coud´e Lab
of the VLT at ESO, and is able to operate either using one 8.2m-VLT UT or simultaneously with the four VLT UTs. ESPRESSO started routine operations in October 2018 at ESO, and is designed to achieve a radial velocity precision of 10 cm/s, thus opening the possibility to explore new frontiers in science such as the search for rocky planets and the measurement of the variation of physical constants (Pepe et al. 2021). ESPRESSO has been very successful so far in detecting and characterizing low-mass planets demonstrating the sub-m/s capabilities of the instrument, providing a unique ground-based facility with great synergy with exoplanet dedicated satellites such as Kepler (Toledo Padr´on et al. 2020), TESS (Demangeon et al. 2021, Barros et al. 2022) and CHEOPS (Leleu et al. 2021). One of the most relevant recent achievement of ESPRESSO is the confirmation of the 11.2d Earth mass planet Proxima b in the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri, previously reported in Anglada-Escudé et al. (2016), and the discovery of the sub-Earth mass planet Proxima d in a 5.1 days orbit with a semiamplitude velocity of 40 cm/s together with a simultaneous, precise characterization of the activity of the star (Suárez Mascaréno et al. 2020; Faria et al. 2022). This discovery together with the 5yr period super-Earth planet candidate Proxima c reported in Damasso et al. (2020), composes the currently known planetary system in the nearest stellar neighbour to our Sun. Recently, we have reported the discovery of two Earth-mass planets in the habitable zone for the nearby star GJ1002 (Su´arez Mascare˜no et al. 2023). With ESPRESSO we are opening the possibility to characterize the Earth-mass and sub-Earth-mass population of exoplanets in the solar neighbourhood. This is encouraging new detailed studies of nearby stars with current and future facilities such as ANDES@ELT (Marconi et al. 2022). In this talk I will briefly summarize the main features of ESPRESSO performance focusing on revealing the Earth-mass and sub-Earth mass planets orbiting nearby stars and future prospects.

Speaker: Jonay González

5 Unusual optical dimming and near-infrared brightening in ASASSN-21qj: exocometary breakup or colliding ice-giants?

Surveys designed to find exoplanetary transits, such as the one done by Kepler, have turned up the existence of stars showing unusually long and deep dimming events.
The first main sequence star reported to show this behavior was KIC 8462852 (Boyajian et al. 2015), and the leading hypothesis is that the dimming is caused by dust from disintegrating comets (e.g., Thompson et al. 2016). To date, the number of objects showing this behavior has grown to about a few dozen, including detections in transient
surveys not specifically designed to find exoplanets.
The most extreme dimming is reported for an object discovered by the All-Sky automated Survey for Supernovae in December 2021. The stellar flux of this object, ASASSN-21qj, was almost completely extinguished during the two deepest dips in the light curve. We have performed ground-based follow-up observations in order to extend the ASASSN lightcurve, using the time between the two deepest dips as an indication of an orbital period (Marshall et al. 2023). We complemented this with a lightcurve from NEOWISE, showing a near-infrared brightening in advance of the dimming event. We have used these observations to constrain the mass and temperature of dust in the circumstellar environment and conclude that the source of this dust could be the catastrophic breakup of one or more exocomets. Recently, an alternative explanation was provided by Kenworthy et al. (2023), who suggest a collision between two ice giants further out in the planetary system as the source of the dust. We will compare the two scenarios.

Speaker: Ciska Kemper

6 Is catalysis in meteorites relevant to the origin of life?

Speaker: Jordi Llorca

16:20 Pausa de cafè i pòsters

7 Prebiotic chemistry and the origin of life: the legacy of Joan Oró

Speaker: Antonio Lazcano

8 Taula rodona: Joan Oró and our ideas on the origin of life

Speakers: Antonio Lazcano, Carme Chica, Ricard Guerrero

9 Xerrada divulgativa: Exoplanetes: A la recerca d’un altra Terra

Speaker: Ignasi Ribas

Tuesday 7 November

10 Investigating the interior secrets of the Solar System

Speaker: Toni Santana-Ros

Comunicacions contribuïdes

11 Exoplanet atmospheres challenges

Speaker: Juan Carlos Morales

12 Unmasking stellar activity: Neural Networks for precise radial velocity measurement for the detection of Earth-like exoplanets

Speaker: Jordi Blanco

11:00 Pausa per cafè i pòsters

13 The Hycean Paradigm in Exoplanet Habitability

Speaker: Nikku Madhusudhan

Comunicacions contribuïdes

14 Contributing to Solar System studies from the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Ja´en

Speaker: Josep Martí

15 Transmission Spectroscopy of Temperate Sub-Neptune Atmospheres with JWST

Speaker: Savvas Constantinou.

13:00 Dinar

14:30 Tarda per a visites locals

20:00 Sopar de les trobades

Wednesday 8 November

16 LIFE looks for life

Speaker: Daniel Angerhausen

Comunicacions contribuïdes

17 Effects of microgravity in human health. What do we know?

Speaker: Antoni Pérez-Poch

11:00 Pausa per cafè i pòsters

Comunicacions contribuïdes

18 Scenarios for intelligent life in the Universe

Speaker: Jordi Miralda (ICCUB)

19 A processual perspective of the living Earth

Speaker: Josep Pelegrí

20 Taula rodona final: The future of the search for life in the Solar System, exoplanets and interstellar medium

13:00 Dinar

21 Tarda: reunions obertes, col·laboracions i pòsters