Tuesday, May 21st, 2019

HASR Bistro

Social/dinner hour from 6 pm: talk starts 7 pm

Everybody welcome: no admission charge

No corkage charge if you buy your wine at the neighboring HASR liquor store

Cheap and easy (cash only) parking at the underground municipal garage at 155 N. Beretania

Exit ramp is directly opposite HASR Bistro

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Dr.  Sarah Fagents

Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, UH-Manoa

Ocean Worlds of the Outer Solar System

Over the past decade or so, we have discovered that a surprising number of the outer Solar System's icy moons harbor subsurface oceans beneath their ice crusts.  This has led to speculation that these ocean worlds might possess conditions suitable for the development of simple life forms, which in turn spurs the development of new spacecraft missions to detect the biosignatures of such life. “Cryovolcanism" is one way that these biosignatures might be transported from their ocean niche to the surface where they might be detected.  This talk will examine several of the most promising extraterrestrial abodes for life.

 

Dr. Sarah Fagents is a volcanologist who studies the physical mechanisms of volcanic eruptions on Earth and other planetary bodies.  She combines field work on volcanoes with numerical modeling of eruption processes and analysis of spacecraft images to understand the interior workings of planets and moons.  She has worked on the volcanoes of Hawaii, New Zealand, Iceland, Arizona, Mexico, the Moon, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter’s moon Io, as well as icy moons of the outer Solar System.