Exoplanets & the Search for Life in the Nearby Universe

Exoplanets are planets orbiting other stars, beyond the Solar System. The first exoplanet was found in 1995 by my former Swiss colleagues in Geneva. Since then, more than 6000 exoplanets have been discovered. A major revelation is how common small exoplanets are: between the sizes of Earth and Neptune. A current quest of exoplanet science is to use the atmospheres of these exoplanets to understand if they are geologically active and/or are habitable using both the James Webb Space Telescope and ground-based telescopes. I will describe the long road towards using next-generation telescopes to detect biosignatures on Earth-like exoplanets, thus completing the modern version of the Copernican revolution started by Didier Queloz and Michel Mayor in 1995.

credits: NASA (R. Hurt)