Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures

Oct. 7, 2026
Jessie Christiansen (CalTech) 
"The Search for Earth 2.0: Why We Think It Exists, & How We’re Going to Find it " 
For thousands of years, we’ve wondered if the Earth is unique, or if there are other Earths out there. In just the last 30 years, we’ve progressed from merely wondering if planets exist around other stars to knowing that almost every star we see has planets. However, we have yet to discover another planet that might be like Earth – a rocky planet orbiting just the right distance from a Sun-like star to have liquid water on its surface. NASA has an audacious new plan for a next-generation flagship telescope that will directly image Earth-like planets around nearby stars, but it will take all of our ingenuity and technical prowess to achieve this feat. Dr Christiansen (the Chief Scientist of the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute) walks us through the past, present, and future of our hunt for Earth 2.0.

May 20, 2026
Dr, Hakeem Oluseyi (CEO, Astronomical Society of the Pacific)
n his new book, Why Do We Exist, Dr. Oluseyi suggests that the story of our existence can be told as a passage through nine interwoven realms—each revealing a new layer of cosmic information. In this public talk, he introduces each of the realms, but then focuses on cosmic connections to the Middle Realm, where we humans live, and to the Realm of Life, where organisms flourish across the vastness of space. He explores these realms with humor and honesty, weaving in stories from his early life in Mississippi and his career in science.

Dr. Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley,
Apr. 8, 2026.
The NASA Psyche mission is on its way to orbit a small but immensely ancient world in our asteroid belt: A metallic object, the first humans will ever have visited. When our solar system was in its infancy, thousands of planetesimals (tiny planet-like objects) formed in less than a million years. Many planetesimals later melted, allowing metal cores to form inside rocky mantles. One of these metal cores may be revealed in the asteroid (16) Psyche. Dr. Elkins-Tanton, the Mission Lead, takes us behind the scenes in planning and carrying out this remarkable mission of exploration, which launched in 2023, and updates us of where we are over two years post-launch.

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.