Exploring life origins on the rocky planets
See CLEVER Planets scientist and Rice University Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences Professor and Chair interviewed by HMNS on Facebook LIVE video at 4 PM (CST), prior to a lecture he will give entitled "Volcanoes, Life and Energy" at the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences in Houston, TX on Tuesday, October 2nd at 6:30 PM in the Planetarium.
"Volcanoes are the gateway between the Earth's deep interior and its surface environment. Over millions of years, volcanoes are what build the continents and provide the carbon, water, and other elements necessary to have an ocean, atmosphere and biosphere. Dr. Cin-Ty Lee will reveal how volcanoes, directly and indirectly, are also behind many of our natural resources, from copper to lithium to diamonds. Even the carbon in the petroleum and natural gas that powers our economy derives ultimately from volcanoes. But volcanoes are not always life-giving. Volcanoes have been known to cause catastrophes, from destruction of civilizations to global mass extinctions."
Speaker: MAX COLLINET, GERMAN AEROSPACE CENTER (DLR), BERLIN Title: Achondrites as witnesses of early melting processes in planetesimals and planetary embryos: experimental constraints and new meteorite discoveries Abstract: Achondrite meteorites are highly variable in composition: some are ultramafic (primitive achondrites) while others are basaltic (e.g. eucrites and angrites), to trachy-andesitic (e.g. GRA 06128 and Erg Chech 002). Those different groups correspond to the mantle and crust of planetary building blocks, respectively. They represent a unique opportunity to constrain the early melting processes that affected planetesimals and could have influenced the final composition of planets. I will describe two sets of low pressureContinue reading
Speaker: ANDERS JOHANSEN, UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN Title: Formation of terrestrial planets by pebble accretion Abstract: The formation of the terrestrial planets in the Solar System is normally considered to last several 10s of million years and to have proceeded by giant impacts within a population of Mars-sized protoplanets. Observations of protoplanetary discs around young stars reveal that such discs host several hundred Earth masses of mm-cm sized pebbles. This inspired the pebble accretion theory for planet formation where the cores of giant planets grow by rapid accretion of these pebbles. By extension, pebble accretion should be an important process inContinue reading