“Are we alone?” has been a fundamental question since the dawn of civilization and we are always curious if there is life in the universe. Since the first detection of a hot Jupiter planet around a sun-like star, 52 Peg, in 1995, The discovery of exoplanets grew exponentially. To date, we have detected over 5000 exoplanets with diverse properties, most of which are significantly different from our own. Although great progress has been made, we have yet found another habitable Earth size (0.8-1.25 Earth radii) planet orbiting a sun-like star. Our Earth 2.0 (ET) space mission is designed to take advantage of a wide field, high precision photometer and a wide field microlensing telescope to monitor millions of stars in the Milky Way for detecting exoplanets. ET is expected to detect ~ 30,000 new planets, including ~5000 Earth-sized planets, 10-20 Earth 2.0s and ~60 free-floating Earth-mass planets, accurately measure their occurrence rates and study their distribution and statistical properties. The follow-up observations of some promising Earth 2.0s around very bright solar type stars may be able to detect biosignatures in their atmospheres. Status of the project and early science study results including detection of Mars-size planet candidates in Kepler data using our deep learning tools will be presented.
Dr. Jian Ge is a chair professor of astronomy at Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He was a professor of Astronomy at University of Florida in 2004-2020, an assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University in 2000-2004, a postdoc research staff at Lawrence Livermore National Lab in 1998-2000. He obtained his PhD in astronomy from the University of Arizona in 1998 and his BSc in theoretical physics from University of Science and Technology in 1989. He is the Principal Investigator of the Earth 2.0 space mission study, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He was the Principal Investigator for the Dharma Planet Survey and the MARVELS survey of the SDSS-III program. His team discovered numerous planets, including discovery of the Vulcan planet orbiting 40 Eridani A in 2018, brown dwarfs, binaries, and various kinds of quasar absorbers. He has published 147 refereed journal papers, 116 technical papers, and was awarded with three US patents. He was inducted into 《Forty Years of Chinese Overseas Students》in 2018.