SETI Talks - Exocomets: Icy bodies from Distant Systems - Livestream

Evidence for exocomets, icy bodies in extrasolar planetary systems, has rapidly increased over
the past decade. Researchers have detected pockets of volatile gases around young stars and star-grazing exocomets transiting in front of their star. With the recently launched JWST, the rapid advances of this budding subfield of exoplanetary science will continue in the short term. They will accelerate with the upcoming Roman Space telescope and the PLATO mission.

To discuss the birth of this new field in astronomy and what we can learn about own solar system by observing those exocomets, we invited Paul Kalas, Professor at the University of California at Berkeley and Luca Matrà, assistant professor at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. Both pioneered the field of exocometary science by direct imaging techniques using the Hubble Space Telescope and the ALMA millimetric array, emphasizing detecting exocomet belts.

The discovery of exocomets in other planetary systems could explain how young Earths can acquire and retain the basic volatiles needed for prebiotic chemistry, an essential step in the genesis of life as we know it.

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