ONLINE: Astronomy Talk: How to Find Earth 2.0
Details
*************************** This is an online event *******************************
We don't have the use of the clubhouse and we wouldn't want to use it until the shelter-in-place order is lifted anyway. But the night sky is still there, and there's still lots to learn. So we'll do this online.
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Come join us for our monthly Astronomy talk!
Topic: How to Find Earth 2.0
Speaker: Dr Peter Plavchan
Abstract:
5000 exoplanets have been confirmed or validated to orbit other stars over the past 30 years. This revolution in our understanding of our Universe is driven by a multitude of advances in data analysis techniques and engineering to achieve unprecedented precision and accuracy. I will provide an overview of the several different methods we use to detect these distant exoplanets, and what we've learned from our discoveries about our Universe. I will present exoplanet research projects at George Mason University, and conclude with a look to the future of exoplanet discovery. The race is on to find Earth-sized planets, understand their atmospheres with JWST and a future flagship direct imaging mission, and search for signs of habitability and if we're lucky, life.
Bio:
Dr Plavchan is an associate professor of Physics and Astronomy at George Mason University, where he is also the Director of George Mason Observatories. He was formerly an assistant professor at Missouri State University, a research scientist at the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute. He earned his PhD in 2006 from UCLA, and undergraduate degree from Caltech in 2001. His research is on the frequency and formation of exoplanets orbiting low-mass stars, and is an expert with the precise radial velocity technique, particularly at near-infrared wavelengths. He discovered the transiting planetary system orbiting AU Mic published in Nature in 2020. He was the PI of the NASA EarthFinder probe mission concept study, and is currently PI of the STAR-Lite and QUASAR mission concepts. He has built instrumentation including for the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility, and uses ground-based telescopes world-wide and in space with the Spitzer, Kepler and TESS missions.