While thousands of extrasolar planets are known to orbit stars other than the Sun, Earth is - until now - the only planet known to be habitable. This lecture takes an interdisciplinary view on Earth as a habitable planet, how it formed, evolved, allowed life to flourish, and how its future might look like. Would we be able to identify another Earth-like planet amongst the population of exoplanets?
Learning objective
Attending students will • understand Earth place in the cosmos • learn tools to discern the history of Earth and other planets • explore the origin and co-evolution of Earth and life • put Earth in context with extrasolar planets
Content
This lecture focuses on our home planet - Earth - from an interdisciplinary perspective. As the search for habitable - and potentially even inhabited - extrasolar planets is one of the most dynamic research fields in modern astrophysics, understanding what makes a planet habitable is a topic of increasing importance; and a highly interdisciplinary topic. In broad brushes, this lecture will discuss the building blocks of planetary systems and their formation, how we can learn about the history of Earth and other planets, what major epochs we can identify over the course of Earth’s 4.5 billion year history, when life arose on Earth and what impact it had on Earth’s evolution, how the future Earth might look like, and - last but certainly not least - how we can search for an Earth-like planet in our cosmic neighbourhood and what our chances are to be successful.
Performance assessment
Performance assessment information (valid until the course unit is held again)
Performance assessment as a semester course