Distant Worlds: What We Know About Extra-Solar Planets...

Greetings, fellow astrophiles!

Firing up 2017 meetup.com festivities for CNYO with an indoor lecture to start.

I’m pleased to announce that CNYO is co-sponsoring a lecture with the Cazenovia College Science Cafe Committee (http://www.cazenovia.edu/) on one of the great achievements in observational astronomy in the last decade – the discovery and characterization of extra-solar planets (exoplanets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet)).

The lecture is free and open to the public. Map and any additional info is available on the CNYO website at: http://www.cnyo.org/2017/02/22/distant-worlds-what-we-know-about-extra-solar-planets-and-their-potential-for-habitability/

Title: Distant Worlds: What We Know About Extra-Solar Planets And Their Potential For Habitability

Presenter: Dr. Leslie Hebb (http://www.hws.edu/academics/physics/facultyProfile.aspx?facultyID=161), Hobart and William Smith Colleges (http://www.hws.edu/)

Abstract: Since the first extra-solar planet was discovered around the star 51 Pegasi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/51_Pegasi), there has been an explosion of research aimed at discovering and characterizing planets around other stars. With the launch of NASA’s Kepler mission (https://kepler.nasa.gov/), the number of known exoplanets has grown to nearly 5000 including almost 500 multi-planet “solar systems”. Through these and other discoveries, we have learned that exoplanets are ubiquitous throughout the Galaxy, and many planetary systems look very different than our own Solar System (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System). This research has radically transformed our thinking about how our own Solar System in particular and solar systems in general form and evolve. I will discuss how exoplanets are detected and characterized, the current exoplanet census, and our current understanding of how planetary systems form and evolve. I will also discuss how we identify potentially habitable worlds and what future missions are designed to identify and characterize habitability.