Department Colloquium Series

Date: 

Monday, September 18, 2017, 12:00pm

Location: 

Haller Hall (Geological Museum, room 102)

Speaker: Professor Dave Charbonneau from Harvard University 

Title: "The Terrestrial Planets of Other Stars"

Abstract: When exoplanets transit their parent stars, we are granted an unparalleled opportunity to detect their presence and study their bulk properties. I will review recent analyses of data from the NASA Kepler Mission to deduce the rate of occurrence of small planets. I will then present follow up measurements of the acceleration of a subset of the host stars, which allows us to estimate the planetary masses and hence densities. Finally, I will discuss recent findings from the MEarth Project, which seeks to discover the most spectroscopically accessible terrestrial exoplanets. Our recent discovery of a temperate rocky world orbiting the nearby small star LHS1140 provides an unprecedented opportunity to detect the molecules present in the atmosphere of a terrestrial exoplanet. [Background Reading]

Dave