HYBRID – General Meeting – October 2025

Title: “The Search for Life on Exoplanets”

Telescopic facilities capable of searching for signs of life on exoplanets orbiting other stars are coming online just as experiments simulating the emergence of life on Earth are making revolutionary discoveries. Dr. Sukrit Ranjan will discuss recent progress towards both goals, with emphasis on new opportunities unveiled by the James Webb Space Telescope and the future planned Habitable Worlds Observatory, NASA’s proposed infrared/optic/ultraviolet space telescope to primarily search for exoplanets in the habitable zones of stars.

Biography:

Sukrit is a planetary scientist focused on questions related to the origin of life on Earth and the search for life on other worlds. These questions are coupled: efforts to understand the origin of life on Earth helps guide our search for it elsewhere in the cosmos, while observations of other planets help us test our theories of the prebiotic environment and of abiogenesis. To understand abiogenesis, he works to constrain the palette of environmental conditions from which life arose on Earth, to guide experimental studies of the origin of life. To search for life elsewhere, he works to determine observational tests by which life on other worlds may be remotely discriminated. Sukrit completed his PhD in Astronomy & Astrophysics at Harvard University, followed by a SCOL postdoctoral fellowship at MIT EAPS and a CIERA postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern. He completed his undergraduate work at MIT in physics. More information about Sukrit is available at his faculty profile here: https://www.lpl.arizona.edu/faculty/sukrit-ranjan

 Dr. Sukrit Ranjan