Dr. Sarah Rugheimer is an astrophysicist and the Allan I Carswell Chair at York University in Toronto. She works on how to detect life on an exoplanet by looking for atmospheric biosignatures. Her research interests are modelling the atmosphere and climate of extrasolar planets with a particular focus on atmospheric biosignatures in Earth-like planets as well as modelling early Earth conditions.
She earned her bachelor’s degree in physics at the University of Calgary, and her M.A. and Ph.D. at Harvard in Astrophysics. She then took the Simons Origins of Life Research Fellowship to St. Andrews followed by a Glasstone Research Fellowship at Oxford. In addition to research, Sarah is interested public outreach. Her TED talk “The Search for Microscopic Aliens” has 1.7 million views on TED.com. She previously has been awarded the Barrie Jones Award and the BSA Rosalind Franklin Lectureship in 2019, and the Caroline Herschel Lectureship Prize in 2018. Her new astrobiology course for the public is available on Amazon Audible Originals, called “Searching for Extraterrestrial Life.”
Title: Biosignatures through rocky planet evolution around other stars
Abstract: When we observe the first terrestrial exoplanet atmospheres, we expect to find planets around a wide range of stellar types, UV environments, and geological conditions. Since the first exoplanets available for characterization will be likely for M dwarf host stars with JWST, understanding the UV environment of these cool stars is a vital step in understanding the atmospheres of these planets. Future missions such as LUVOIR and LIFE will be able to do direct detection of the atmospheres of planets orbiting FGK stars. Additionally, the atmospheres of these planets will not be fixed in time. Earth itself offers many possible atmospheric states of a planet. We set out to examine how an Earth-like planet at different geological epochs might look around FGKM star types from a prebiotic world to modern Earth and considering the detectability with LIFE and LUVOIR. Additionally, we examine the plausibility of detecting prebiotically interesting molecules, such as HCN, NH3, CH4, and C2H6 in an early-Earth type atmosphere around stars with different UV environments.
