“Towards Habitable Worlds: Detailed Characterization of the Nearest Planetary Systems”
Speaker: Prof. Andrew Vanderburg, Assistant Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: Monday, May 19, 2025
Time: 3:30 – 4:30pm
Location: ISB 102 & Zoom (link)
Over the past thirty years, astronomers have made extraordinary progress in detecting planets around other stars. We now know that stars commonly host planets with a wider range of physical properties and system architectures than exist in our own solar system, and that planets likely outnumber stars in our galactic neighborhood. Now, planet detection and characterization technologies have advanced to the point that it should be possible to search for signs of life in the atmospheres of Earth-like exoplanets around Sun-like stars within a few decades. These observations will give us our first glimpse at how common — or rare — life is in the universe. However, before we can carry out these observations and understand the implications for the abundance of life outside the Solar system, we must first find the nearest habitable planets to observe, learn their detailed properties, and refine our understanding of habitability. In this talk, I will describe my group’s work to fill in these knowledge gaps by developing new tools and methods to detect and characterize exoplanets. First, I will show how cutting-edge machine learning methods could help reveal the closest potentially habitable planets to Earth — ideal for biosignature searches in the 2040s. Next, I will show how we can learn about extrasolar geochemistry by studying planetary accretion onto white dwarf stars — allowing us to see whether geological processes important for habitability on Earth take place in other systems. And finally, I will describe our work to understand what happens to planets when stars run out of nuclear fuel and find out whether life can continue in a system after the host star’s death.
About the Speaker:
Andrew Vanderburg’s research focuses on studying exoplanets using telescope observations. Andrew is interested in developing cutting-edge techniques and methods to discover new planets outside of our solar system, and studying the planets we find to learn their detailed properties. 
In recent years, astronomers have found that planets the size of Earth are common in our galaxy, but little is known about their characteristics. Are these planets mostly rocky like the Earth, or do they have thick gaseous atmospheres like Uranus and Neptune? From which elements and materials are these planets built, and are their geologies similar to our own planet’s?
Andrew and his team tackle these problems by conducting astronomical observations using facilities on Earth like the Magellan Telescopes in Chile as well as space-based observatories like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and the James Webb Space Telescope. Once the data from these telescopes are in hand, Andrew’s team specializes in developing new analysis methods that help extract as much scientific value as possible. Currently, Andrew’s group is exploring the use of machine learning — especially deep neural networks — in exoplanet detection to both increase the sensitivity and efficiency of planet searches. Eventually, through this work, Andrew hopes to help answer questions like “Are the planets orbiting other stars throughout the galaxy anything like the worlds in our Solar system?” and “Could any of these planets be hospitable to life like the Earth?”.
Andrew received his BA in Physics and Astrophysics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2013 and his PhD in Astronomy from Harvard University in 2017. Afterwards, Andrew moved to the University of Texas at Austin with a NASA Sagan postdoctoral fellowship. In 2020, Andrew joined the faculty in Astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before moving to MIT in July 2021.