Björn Benneke

Welcome!

Björn Benneke is an Associate Professor of Planetary Astronomy at UCLA's Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Science. He is known for his leadership in probing the chemical composition and habitability of planets outside the solar system using the world's most powerful telescopes as well as advanced computer simulations. Currently, he is leading the largest survey program with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to probe the intruiging nature of water-world exoplanets. He also serves on the Science Advisory Councils of STScI's historic JWST Rocky Worlds DDT program, the Thirty Meter Telescope construction project, as well as the instrument development teams of Keck/HISPEC and TMT/MODHIS. Overall, Benneke has co-authored over 140 peer-review publications including 15 articles in the prestigous journal Nature, 7 articles in Nature Astronomy, 1 in Science, and over 20 in ApJL. Together, his publications have received over 13,000 citations, with over 10,000 of these citations within the past 5 years.

At UCLA, he currently also serves on the Faculty Executive Committee of the College of Letters & Sciences responsible for the academic matters and well-being of 50 departments with over 27,000 students and 900 faculty members. Within UCLA EPSS, he is the Graduate Program Advisor on the department's leadership team overseeing the grad admission, grad student orientation, allocation of fellowships and teaching assistantships, and certification of advancements and student matters. He is also an adjunct professor at the University of Montreal.

News

Current Research

We live at a pivotal moment in human history, one in which our technology has brought us to the brink of answering some of the greatest questions of all: "How did we get here?" and "Are we alone in the universe?" Recognizing this opportunity, the U.S. Decadal Survey now lists "Pathways to Habitable Worlds" as its first top science priority, explicitly stating: "The 2020s and beyond will be an era of spectroscopy of exoplanet atmospheres".

At this pivotal moment, Prof. Benneke's research group is in a rare position to make the next great leaps in this historic endeavor of exoplanet characterization. He and his team are leading some of the most ambitious observational campaigns using NASA's new James Webb Space Telescope as well as the world's most powerful ground-based telescopes. Using these unique resources, Benneke and his team are currently

1) exploring the prevalence and nature of "water worlds" in the Universe, an intriguing new class of planets with massive envelopes of water or other volatiles,

2) probing the diversity of atmospheres on rocky planets in search of Earth-like climates, volcanism, and biosignatures,

3) developing a fundamental understanding of the physical and chemical processes that govern planetary atmospheres and climate regimes at the most general level, and finally,

4) measuring the elemental compositions of gaseous planets with the ultimate goal of understanding how planets form and how they evolve over time.