Eamonn Kerins is an astrophysicist in The University of Manchester’s Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics. His interests include finding planets around other stars and making large surveys of our Milky Way Galaxy.

Eamonn looks for cool planets around other stars by detecting how they warp space-time. He co-leads the Exoplanet Science Working Group for the European Space Agency’s upcoming Euclid space mission, and has previously acted as a consultant for NASA’s WFIRST space telescope proposal. He is also a member of the MiNDSTEp team, which looks for planets using ground-based telescopes.

The Hunt for Earth 2

In the last 20 years astronomers have gone from a state of total ignorance about planets around other stars (exoplanets) to finding thousands of exoplanetary systems using a range of techniques. In some cases we are now probing the atmospheres of exoplanets. Eamonn will describe the techniques we use to look for and characterise exoplanets and will discuss our current understanding of exoplanetary systems and how the architecture of our own Solar System fits into this understanding. He will briefly talk about the road ahead for exoplanet science over the coming 10-20 years, and will argue that it is likely that within the next 30-50 years we will know whether life on other planets is a common or rare phenomenon