Water Above, Water Below, Water Within: The Many Roles of Water in Making Planets Habitable

On Wednesday, November 15, 2023 at 7 pm (PST), Dr. Laura Schaefer (Stanford U) will give a free, illustrated, non-technical lecture entitled:    

"Water Above, Water Below, Water Within: The Many Roles of Water in Making Planets Habitable"  

in the Smithwick Theater at Foothill College, in Los Altos (see directions below)   

The talk is part of the Silicon Valley Astronomy Lecture Series, now in its 24th year.   

Water is everywhere. Its atoms, hydrogen and oxygen, are the first and fifth most abundant elements in the universe. Water is found in abundance in many environments; it finds its way into planets of all shapes and sizes, where it modifies the properties of everything it touches. Water is crucial to life, both as a habitat and as a solvent. But it also has many other roles in the evolution of habitable and uninhabitable environments on a planetary scale. In this talk, Dr. Schaefer will discuss the ways in which Earth acquired its water, how water modifies the evolution and habitability of the Earth, and how the habitability of rocky planets orbiting other stars may be different.   

Laura Schaefer is an Assistant Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Stanford University. She is a planetary scientist who focuses on how gases and rocks react with each other to form the atmospheres of rocky planets, both inside and outside the Solar System. She is fascinated by lava worlds and the volcanic moon Io, as well as the distant past of planet Earth and its neighbors Venus and Mars.   

Foothill College is just off the El Monte Road exit from Freeway 280 in Los Altos.     

For directions and parking information, see: https://foothill.edu/parking/ 
For a campus map, to find the Smithwick Theater (Bldg. 1000), see: https://foothill.edu/map/    

 The lecture is co-sponsored by:   

• The Foothill College Science, Tech, Engineering & Math Division   
• The SETI Institute   
• The Astronomical Society of the Pacific  
• Stanford’s Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology  

Past lectures in the series can also be found on YouTube at: http://youtube.com/svastronomylectures    

and as audio podcasts at: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1805595