"Detecting Habitable Exoplanets: The Small Star Opportunity""Detecting Habitable Exoplanets: The Small Star Opportunity"http://www.haverford.edu/calendar/details/111432KINSC Sharpless Auditorium2009-12-08T16:30:002009-12-08T18:00:00
December 8, 4:30PM
KINSC Sharpless Auditorium
Talk by David Charbonneau, Astronomy Distinguised Visitor
Description
Talk by David Charbonneau, Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor of Astronomy, Harvard University.
Abstract: When exoplanets are observed to transit their parent stars, we are granted direct estimates of their masses and radii, and we can undertake studies of their atmospheres. Such systems have profoundly impacted our understanding of giant exoplanets akin to Jupiter or Neptune, but the study of smaller rocky exoplanets has only just begun. By targeting nearby low-mass stars, a transit search using modest equipment is capable of discovering planets as small as 2 Earth radii in their stellar habitable zones. The discovery of such planets would provide fundamental constraints on the physical structure of planets that are primarily rock and ice in composition. Moreover, by differencing spectra gathered when the planet is in view from those when it is occulted by the star, we can study the atmospheric chemistry of potentially habitable worlds.
David Charbonneau joined the faculty in the Department of Astronomy at Harvard University in August 2004. His research focuses on the development of novel techniques for the detection and characterization of planets orbiting nearby, Sun-like stars. Dr. Charbonneau is a founding member of the Trans-Atlantic Exoplanet Survey, which uses a network of small, automated telescopes to survey tens of thousands of stars for periodic eclipses that indicate the passage of orbiting planets. In 2005, he led the team that made the first direct detection of light emitted by a planet outside the Solar system. Dr. Charbonneau earned his PhD in astronomy from Harvard University, and received his undergraduate degree in math and physics from the University of Toronto. In 2004, the Astronomical Society of the Pacific awarded him the Robert J. Trumpler Award for his graduate thesis entitled "Shadows and Reflections of Extrasolar Planets". He was recently named an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, and awarded a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering.
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