Public Seminar: Are We Alone?

See and hear from three pivotal planet-hunters of the NASA Kepler Mission to find planets around Sun-like stars---especially Earth-size planets that could be inhabited.

Once you realize that every star is a whole sun unto itself, the question naturally arises: "Do stars have planets that could be homes to more or less intelligent beings like ourselves?"  It has been only in the last 15 years that we even knew for sure that other stars had planets and now it's the NASA Kepler mission that is unfolding riches of data that now allow us to begin cataloging planets orbiting stars other than the Sun and take some of the very first steps to answer that question, "Are we alone?"  This seminar features a panel of key investigators in the NASA Kepler Mission Science Team who will share their insights, inspirations, late-breaking findings, and hints about what new discoveries we might be hearing from the mission in the future.

"Astronomers have cracked the Milky Way like a piñata, and planets are now pouring out so fast that they do not know what to do with them all."
- Dennis Overbye, NewYorkTimes, Feb 2, 2011

Panelists:
• Bill Borucki, Principal Investigator,
NASA Kepler Mission, Ames Research Center, Mountain View, CA
• Natalie Batalha,
Co-Investigator and Deputy Science Team Lead for the NASA Kepler Mission,
Professor of Physics and Astronomy at San Jose State University, and
lead author of the published article about the discovery of the
first nearly Earth-size rocky planet.
• Gibor Basri, Co-Investigator for NASA Kepler Mission and
professor in the Department of Astronomy at University of California, Berkeley
• Moderator: Andrew Fraknoi, Astronomical Society of the Pacific, and
Chair of Astronomy Department at Foothill College, Los Altos Hills, CA