Searching for Evidence of Life Beyond the Solar System with the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) and the GMT-Consortium Large Earth Finder (G-CLEF)

Andrew Szentgyorgyi 

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Two of the highest priority programs in astrophysics are the discovery and characterization of Earth 2.0 – rocky, Earth-mass exoplanets orbiting Solar-type stars in their habitable zone and the

search for biomarkers in the atmospheres of exoplanets in general, The first program is enabled by precision radial velocity (PRV) measurements of the line-of-sight reflex motion of host stars in

response to the gravitational influence of low-mass exoplanets that orbit those stars. The search for biomarkers and the characterization of the molecular composition of exoplanets requires

extremely high spectral resolution spectrographs on large aperture telescopes. The G-CLEF spectrograph has been designed to provide these capabilities. Before deployment at the GMT, G-

CLEF will be delivered to the Magellan telescopes in in 2027, to do several pathfinder observational programs that will allow observers to optimize G-CLEF for its delivery to the GMT

in 2032. A key project for G@M will be to exploit adaptive optics to resolve and search for O2 in the atmosphere of a habitable zone planet orbiting the star nearest to the Sun – Proxima Cen b. The

talk will discuss several aspects of habitability, habitability searches and several technical innovations we will deploy to optimize the Proxima Cen b habitability search.

Bio:

Szentgyorgyi has worked in a number of astrophysical areas including neutrino astronomy, very high energy gamma astronomy and X-ray astronomy. For the last two decades he has focused on optical high dispersion stellar spectroscopy with a focus on precision measurement of stellar radial velocities. These measurements are often used to detect and measure the mass of exoplanets, especially the lightest exoplanets with masses similar to that of the Earth. He has exploited a number of state-of-the-art technologies to improve the precision of these measurements. He is currently the principal investigator of the GMT-Consortium Large Earth Finder (G-CLEF), the first light instrument for the Giant Magellan Telescope. With the G-CLEF scientific team, he is exploring the potential of G-CLEF to detect biomarkers in the atmospheres of habitable-zone exoplanets. In addition to stellar astrophysics, his scientific interests include optics, especially vision and atmospheric phenomena and musical acoustics.