A nontechnical talk by Dr. Bruce Macintosh (University of California Observatories)

Mar. 11, 2026

In the past three decades, more than 6000 planets have been discovered orbiting other stars. Advances in technology have allowed a handful of giant planets around other stars to be imaged directly. Dr. Macintosh tells us about the first-ever images of other solar systems — and the technology that has allowed us to discover them, such as the Gemini Planet Imager — as well as the future planet-hunting space telescopes. The ultimate goal is detection of a second ‘pale blue dot’ — an Earth twin where we could even see the biosignatures of extrasolar life. (He also talks a bit about the wind damage to the Lick Observatory and what is being done to repair the historic dome.)

Bruce Macintosh is the Director of the University of California Observatories in California and Hawaii. He co-led the team that imaged the first extrasolar planets, and was the Principal Investigator of the Gemini Planet Imager, an advanced planet-finder for the Gemini South telescope.

A nontechnical talk by Dr. Robert Kirshner, Jan 28, 2026.

One hundred years ago, Edwin Hubble showed that the universe is expanding. In the 1990s, astronomers found that the expansion is not slowing down, as expected, but speeding up. This led to a Nobel Prize in Physics (for our speaker's students) and a consensus that we live in a universe that is made up of invisible dark matter, mysterious dark energy, and only a pinch of the atoms we, and everything we can see in the Universe, are made of. Dr. Kirshner explains this history in everyday language and reviews recent observations indicate that even this picture may be too simple to account for all the evidence. He also discusses the status of building the largest telescopes ever planned in Earth's Northern and Southern hemispheres.

Robert Kirshner is Emeritus Professor of astronomy at Harvard and Research Professor at the California Institute of Technology. He was the Head of Science at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and now serves as the Executive Director of the Thirty-Meter Telescope International Observatory.

Dr. Alfonso Davila (NASA Ames Research Center)

Nov. 24, 2025

In 2005, NASA's Cassini spacecraft made a groundbreaking discovery—it found massive plumes of ice and gas erupting from the south pole of Enceladus, a small but geologically-active moon of Saturn. These plumes are now believed to originate from a subsurface ocean of liquid water beneath the moon’s icy crust, with conditions compatible with life, as we know it. The talk focuses on our current understanding of Enceladus' plume and subsurface ocean, and on past and future strategies to search in them for possible evidence of life.

Alfonso Davila is a Research Scientist in the Exobiology branch at NASA Ames Research Center, where he helps develop strategies to search for evidence of life beyond Earth.