2024 – 2025

The EAI ACADEMY is an international educational program organised and broadcasted by the Centro de Astrobiología (CAB), CSIC-INTA, Madrid, with the support of the European Astrobiology Institute (EAI). It provides a framework to meet online with the international astrobiology community and to acquire interdisciplinary knowledge through a series of seminars given by experts in these fields. The Academy audience connects from more than 32 countries and all continents, with an average participation of 70 attendees per seminar. Past editions are accesible through the CAB youtube channel (link to 2021-2022, link to 2022-2023, link to 2023-2024).

The EAI Academy program for the academic year 2024-2025 will start this October. The seminars are offered for free and are streamed online via zoom every two weeks on Wednesday from 3:00 to 4:00 PM CET (Madrid time). The talks will be given by world-renowned experts, who answer the questions raised by the public after their talk. All seminars will be recorded for future availability in the CAB youtube channel.

At the end of the academic year, CAB awards a certificate of participation to those who attend a minimum of 10 seminars. In order for us to keep track of the attendance, you will need to enter your name and affiliation in the seminar chat when you enter the room (Zoom).

If you were part of the program in previous years your email is already in the distribution list and you DO NOT NEED TO SUBSCRIBE again. If you want to register to the EAI Academy distribution list, please include your information here.

Link to the  form
This registration form will be closed in October.

We will post soon here an update of the list of speakers and talks.

LIST OF SPEAKERS AND TOPICS

Sara Seager

October 2, 2024

Venus as Potentially Habitable Planet

For thousands of years, inspired by the star-filled dark night sky, people have wondered what lies beyond Earth. Today, the search for signs of life is a key motivator in modern-day planetary exploration. Scientists have been speculating on Venus as a habitable world for over half a century, not the scorching surface, but the much cooler atmosphere at 48 to 60 km above the surface. The concept is that Venus’ perpetual cloud cover might host life, as Earth’s clouds do. Many different decades-old Venusian atmosphere anomalies support this concept. The Venus clouds, however, are not made of water but are composed of concentrated sulfuric acid—an aggressive chemical that is toxic for Earth life. New lab-based experiments on the stability of nucleic acid bases, amino acids, and dipeptides in concentrated sulfuric acid advance the notion that the Venus atmosphere environment may be able to support complex chemicals needed for life and motivate the astrobiology-focused Morning Star Missions to Venus.

Victoria Muñoz Iglesias

October 16, 2024

Aqueous chemistry in ocean worlds

Ocean worlds are those planetary bodies that contain or have contained for a long period of time significant amounts of liquid water, either at the surface and/or in the subsurface. In our solar system, besides the Earth, both Ceres and the main icy moons of the outer solar system (OSS) show evidence of fulfilling or having fulfilled this condition. The maintenance of an ocean requires a constant energetic input over time to prevent solidification to ice. In those bodies with a predominantly rocky layer, such as the Earth and to a lesser extent Ceres, this input comes from radioactive decay, in addition to the primordial heat after its formation. However, in the icy moons of the OSS, farther from the Sun, this input comes from the strong tidal forces produced during their orbit around their larger parent planets, i.e., the gas or icy giants. This energetic input also favors other substances (such as gases, salts, and silicates), to be released from the more rocky layers (usually located below the hydrospheres or partially intermixed) and interact with the water molecules. In this talk my intention is to show the aqueous chemistry, and the geological implications, that can take place on the ocean worlds of the OSS. I will show how water chemistry evolves from the interior to the surface due to pressure and temperature changes. The evolution of cryomagmas, according to their initial composition and depending on what they encounter on their way, will give rise to various chemical reactions and precipitation of different minerals. Moreover, when they reach the surface, the radical environmental change causes the cryomagmas to continue to modify themselves chemically and physically. Experimental study and geochemical and geophysical modeling of the various processes that cryomagmas can follow from the interior to the surface serve to infer the interior composition from data taken at the surface during space missions to these planetary bodies.