Speaker night: Gaia Mission & Analysis of the Binary Star HD 165401

Although we are likely still decades away from discovering signs of life on worlds outside of our own solar system, much progress is being made today to identify the best potential candidates for hosting such life. In this talk, I will discuss much of what we currently know about these so-called exoplanets and how we know it. I will then highlight the steps that will be taken in the not-so-distant future to characterize the conditions on potentially habitable exoplanets using extreme telescopes. All of this in hopes that one day these efforts will culminate with the probable detection of life like our own elsewhere in the galaxy.