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On November 16, 2016, Eddie Schwieterman, a NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) fellow with the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) Alternative Earths team, and Giada Arney, NPP fellow at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and member of the NAI Virtual Planetary Laboratory, joined the Night Sky Network (NSN) for Exploring Exoplanet Biosignatures, Potential “False Positives” for Life, and the Case of Proxima Centauri b.

About the webinar (excerpted from NSN):

In the coming years and decades, we will finally gain the ability to characterize potentially habitable planets outside of the solar system. How would we recognize a habitable or inhabited planet, and what type of instrumentation would this require? Could we be fooled by potential “biosignature impostors”, abiotic processes which could mimic the signatures of life, such as atmospheric oxygen? In this presentation, we provide an overview of the nascent field of exoplanet biosignature science, primarily describing work done by the NASA Astrobiology Institute’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory. We will describe modeling “Earth as an Exoplanet”, how to avoid potential “false positives” for life, and how studying the Earth through time may help us identify other habitable worlds.

For more information about the Night Sky Network, visit: https://nightsky.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm.