ExoLunch spring-2024

We are at the dawn of a new era of planetary science, marked by groundbreaking discoveries and rapid advances in our understanding of planets and their atmospheres in the most general way. The opportunity is no less than to assess the full diversity of the planets in the Universe, to understand their climatic states, and to finally answer humanity's millennia-old questions of "How did we get here?" and "Are we alone?" In this colloquium, I will give you a first glimpse of this new era by showing how our early results from JWST and high-resolution spectrographs are already challenging many long-held ideas in planetary science. I will present new "hot off the press" JWST results that are fundamentally changing our understanding of the likely most common type of planet in the Universe, with masses between Earth and Neptune. I will also discuss how our ongoing observations are advancing our understanding of planet formation and evolution, and finally, I will present the first JWST spectroscopic results for habitable-zone rocky worlds outside the Solar System and our next steps to further characterize them.