Origins Institute Public Lecture – Titan: Ingredients for Life

The Origins Institute in partnership with the McMaster Alumni Association is pleased to welcome to Hamilton Dr. Sarah M Hörst from Johns Hopkins University to give a FREE public lecture on her research.

Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is unique in our solar system. Below Titan’s thick organic haze layer, rivers of methane carve channels into an icy bedrock and flow into large hydrocarbons seas. Across the landscape, water ice mountains and extensive organic sand dune fields are simultaneously alien and reminiscent of Earth. Titan’s lake mottled surface and thick, organic rich atmosphere may be an ideal setting for life as we do not know it and there is certainly much yet to be learned about our own home from the study of Titan.

Sarah M Hörst is Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Johns Hopkins University where she is working to understand the formation and composition of planetary atmospheric hazes. Dr. Hörst received her B.S. in Planetary Science and B.S. in Literature from the California Institute of Technology in 2004. While at Caltech, she worked with Dr. Michael Brown studying Europa and Titan. After graduating from Caltech, she worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for a year. She earned her PhD from the University of Arizona where she studied the chemistry occurring in Titan’s atmosphere with Dr. Roger Yelle at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. She continued her studies as an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow working with Dr. Margaret Tolbert at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at University of Colorado-Boulder.

Doors open at 7:00 pm – Light refreshments served
Lecture begins at 7:30 pm

For more information and to register please visit http://alumni.mcmaster.ca/titan or contact ckenned@mcmaster.ca