XXXVIII Trobades Científiques de la Mediterrània - Josep Miquel Vidal

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

How did life emerge and evolve, from the creation of heavy elements in supernovae like the one that originated the Crab nebula, to the life we find today in a place such as a beach in Minorca?

 

The XXXVIII Trobades de la Mediterrània: Life in the Universe, formation and evolution of the Solar System, and exoplanets will take place at the Insititut Menorquí d'Estudis in Maó on November 6, 7 and 8, 2023.

After almost 30 years of the discovery of the first exoplanet, we now have discovered more than 5000 exoplanets and have characterized their distribution in mass, radius, orbital period and eccentricity over a broad range of these parameters. The atmospheric composition of exoplanets transiting over their stars is being analyzed with increasing detail, thanks among others to the new spectroscopic observations with JWST.

At the same time, life in the Solar System can be searched in several bodies that contain liquid water in their interior, namely Mars and various satellites of Jupiter and Saturn, as well as small solid asteroids or satellites that may contain fossil evidence on the origin of life in their internal ices. This suggests that the discovery of fundamental clues on the origin and prevalence of life in the Universe may occur in the not too distant future.

 The goal of this meeting is to bring together active researchers from a broad range of scientific areas related to the search for life in the Solar System and beyond; the origin of the Solar System and the study of meteorites, comets and exocomets; and the characterization of exoplanets that may host the appearance of living organisms on a variety of environments in the Universe.

 

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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 Welcome, introductory remarks

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 Lunch

Contributed talks

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 Coffee break & Poster papers

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

Speaker: Antonio Lazcano

8 Round table discussion: Joan OrÓ and our ideas on the origin of life

Speakers: Antonio Lazcano, Carme Chica, Ricard Guerrero

9 Outreach talk: 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

Contributed talks

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 Coffee Break & Posters

13 The Hycean Paradigm in Exoplanet Habitability

Speaker: Nikku Madhusudhan

Contributed talks

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 Lunch

16 Afternoon for local visits

20:00 Conference Dinner

Wednesday 8 November

17 LIFE looks for life

Speaker: Daniel Angerhausen

Contributed talks

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

Speaker: Antoni Pérez-Poch

11:00 Coffee Break & Posters

Contributed talks

19 Scenarios for intelligent life in the Universe

Speaker: Jordi Miralda (ICCUB)

20 A processual perspective of the living Earth

Speaker: Josep Pelegrí

21 Final round-table discussion: The future of the search for life in the Solar System, exoplanets and interstellar medium

13:00 Lunch

22 Open gatherings for discussions, collaborations and poster papers