Tonight's topic: The Grand Tour: Properties of Planets Outside the Solar System
We currently know of more than 10,000 planets and planet candidates orbiting nearby stars. Many of these extrasolar planets look quite different than the planets in the solar system, including Jupiter-like gas giants on close-in orbits, `mini-Neptunes’ with puffy hydrogen-rich atmospheres, and rocky `super-Earths’ with masses many times that of Earth or Venus. In my talk I will provide a guided tour of the exoplanet zoo as we understand it today, and describe ongoing efforts to characterize the properties of these distant worlds using both ground- and space-based telescopes.
Heather Knutson is a professor of planetary science in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences at the California Institute of Technology. She grew up on Kwajalein Atoll, located about halfway between Hawaii and Australia. Although the island's relatively isolated location was ideal for stargazing, it was not until many years later when she did a summer internship at the Space Telescope Science Institute (home of the Hubble Space Telescope) that she decided to pursue a career in astronomy. Heather obtained her B.S. in physics from Johns Hopkins University and PhD in astronomy from Harvard University, then spent two years at UC Berkeley as a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow before moving to Caltech in 2011