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NRF|SAAO Cape Town Open Night
June 13 @ 8:00 pm - 10:00 pm
Join us for Open Nights at the South African Astronomical Observatory (NRF/SAAO) in Cape Town, held on the second and fourth Saturday of every month.
Each evening begins with an engaging presentation on astronomy or a related field of science, followed by a guided tour of the Observatory’s rich history—including our library, museum, and the historic 120-year-old McClean Telescope.
Weather permitting, guests will have the opportunity to enjoy stargazing through the McClean and additional smaller telescopes.
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- Gates open at 7:30 PM.
- Free entry for children aged 6 and under.
Please email cptbookings@saao.ac.za or call +27 21 447 0025 if you have any queries regarding bookings.
Speaker: Chase Alvarado-Anderson
Bio: Chase Alvarado-Anderson is a Ph.D. student in Earth and Planetary Sciences at Stanford University. His research explores how rocky planets form, evolve, and become potentially habitable by linking planetary interiors, atmospheres, climate, and observations of exoplanets. He earned a B.A. in Astronomy from Dartmouth College and is passionate about science communication, sustainability, and making astronomy accessible to wider audiences.
Abstract: “How to Build a Habitable World: A Cosmic Recipe for Planets, Atmospheres, and Life”
What makes a planet habitable? It is not just being at the right distance from a star. A planet’s ability to support life depends on its whole history: how it formed, what it is made of, how its interior evolved, what gases it released, and whether its climate stayed stable over time.
This talk will take you from the first moments of planet formation to the atmospheres of alien worlds. We will explore giant impacts, magma oceans, volcanoes, Venus-like greenhouse worlds, frozen planets, tidally locked “eyeball” planets, and the TRAPPIST-1 system. We will also discuss how telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope can read the “barcode” of a planet’s atmosphere from light-years away. By the end, we will see why the search for life is really the search for planetary stories.