Searching for Life in Space

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Searching for Life in Space

Is there life on other planets in the universe? Or does life only exist on Earth? These are some of mankind's oldest questions. Today we can utilise  technologies that might help to answer them. Andreas Elsaesser from Freie Universität Berlin and Riccardo Urso from the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics study the conditions for life in space and on other planets. Their lecture will give us an insight into the scientific possibilities of searching for extraterrestrial life today. What are researchers actually looking for in the endless universe? How can we explore life and its prerequisites in space? And not least, their research touches upon the big philosophical question: What is life?

Speaker info:

Dr. Riccardo Giovanni Urso is a researcher at the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics, INAF-Astrophysical Observatory of Catania. Dr. Urso is interested in astrochemistry and astrobiology and he studies how matter and the building blocks of life formed at the dawn of the Solar System. His studies are based on laboratory experiments to simulate the chemical processes that happen when a star and its planets form. These processes are at the origin of the Sun, the Earth and the other planets and he investigates the formation of materials to seek for “the seeds of life” in his samples. He also uses laboratory data to interpret astronomical observations of star-forming regions that resemble the young Solar System and data of space missions to comets and asteroids. Dr. Urso received his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Nanotechnology from the University of Catania (Italy) in 2018. He then worked as a postdoctoral fellow for the French Space Agency (CNES) at the Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, Insitut d’Astrophysique Spatiale (France) and in 2020, he joined the Experimental Biophysics and Space Science team at Freie Universität Berlin as an Einstein International Postdoctoral Fellow. Since 2022, Dr. Urso is an INAF researcher.

The interdisciplinary expertise of Andreas Elsaesser spans from biophysics to astrobiology, astrochemistry and space sciences. He studied Physics at TU Munich and completed his PhD in NanoBiophysics in the United Kingdom at the University of Ulster. As a postdoc, Andreas worked at the University of Leiden, was a guest scientist at NASA Ames and the ESA Technology Center in Holland. Currently, he is a Freigeist Fellow of the Volkswagen Foundation and research group leader at Freie Universität Berlin. Previous fellowships include a POINT Fellowship from Freie Universität Berlin and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship from the European Comission. Andreas leads the ‘Experimental Biophysics and Space Sciences’ group at the Physics Department of Freie Universität Berlin. There, he and his team focus on research topics spanning from astrophysics to astrochemistry and exobiology. Additionally, he is PI of the ESA space exposure experiments OREOcube and Exocube on the International Space Station, mission scientists of the ESA SpectroCube mission and Co-I of several other space experiments. Andreas Elsaesser chaired the ESA Astrobiology/Astrochemistry Topical Team and is actively involved in advising ESA and other space agencies on future strategies and research directions in the fields of astrobiology and astrochemistry. A primary emphasis of his work and research is on methods for detecting life on other planets within our solar system and beyond.

© Alexandre Piquelin