Astronomy Ireland Public Lecture Imaging other worlds By Dr. Markus Janson, Queens University Belfast. Monday 14th July at 8:00pm Trinity College Dublin 7 euro in or 5 euro for AI members or mention Republic Of Astronomy and get in for 5 euro too. Come for a drink after the lecture just across the road. Most extrasolar planets that we know of today have actually never been seen, because they drown out in the light of their much brighter parent star. Instead, we know that they exist from how they affect their parent star as they orbit around it. However, technology and methodologies are very rapidly improving, allowing us to image an increasing fraction of these planets directly. Such studies are useful not only in the sense that they provide the ultimate proof for the existence of the imaged planet, but also because they allow us to study the planet in much greater detail, including the possibility to determine the contents of its atmosphere. This, in turn, allows us to assess whether it might be hospitable to life. I will talk about the improvements that have allowed us to get to the point where we can image some of the extrasolar planets, and how the field will develop in the future, with the overarching goal to reach the ability to image Earth-like planets in the so-called habitable zones of other stars in the galaxy. About the Lecturer Markus Janson is a Lecturer at the Astrophysics Research Center in Queens University Belfast. Originally from Sweden, he moved to Germany in 2005 for PhD studies at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg. Having finished his PhD in 2008, he spent five years at the University of Toronto and Princeton University before recently going back across the Atlantic to take up a Lectureship at Queens. His main scientific interest is extrasolar planets, which he studies primarily through direct imaging and spectroscopy.
Posted on: Mon, 14 Jul 2014 12:47:15 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015