Exploring Planets Orbiting Nearby Stars

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr Annelies Mortier.

The NASA Kepler mission revealed that our Galaxy is teeming with planetary systems and that Earth-sized planets are common, but most of the planets detected by Kepler orbit stars that are too faint to permit detailed study. Excitingly, the NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) launched in April 2018 and is finding hundreds of small planets orbiting stars that are much closer and brighter. Unlike the Kepler planets, the TESS planets are ideal targets for follow-up observations to determine their masses, compositions, and atmospheric properties. I will describe how in-depth analyses of the TESS planets are allowing us to probe the compositional diversity of small planets, investigate the formation of planetary systems, and set the stage for the next phase of exoplanet exploration: the quest for biosignatures in the atmospheres of strange new worlds.

This talk is part of the Institute of Astronomy Colloquia series.

Date

May 20 2021
Expired!

Time

British Summer Time
4:00 am - 5:00 pm

Local Time

  • Timezone: America/New_York
  • Date: May 19 - 20 2021
  • Time: 11:00 pm - 12:00 pm

More Info

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Domain

Astrophysics

Location

Virtual
Category

Organizer

(KICC) The Kavli Institute for Cosmology at Cambridge University
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