Presented on ZOOM Public Lecture December 9th at 7pm
ABOUT THE LECTURE:
“Atmospheres of Alien Worlds”
The discovery of thousands of exoplanets in our Galaxy has revolutionised our understanding of planetary systems; however, we still know very little about the planets themselves. Transiting planets, those that periodically eclipse their host stars, play a special role in our understanding of exoplanets. They are the only exoplanets for which we can measure the mass and radius, and therefore obtain the bulk density and composition. They also allow us to characterise their atmospheres in detail. This is necessary to understand the composition and physics of planetary atmospheres as well as their formation and evolution, and ultimately to search for atmospheric constituents in terrestrial planets that may indicate the presence of life, so called ‘biomarkers’.
The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) heralds a new era in our understanding of exoplanets and their atmospheres. He will discuss our current understanding of exoplanet atmospheres.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Dr. Neale Gibson
He is currently a professor in physics in Trinity College Dublin. He was a Lecturer and Royal Society University Research Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast. Before that he was a fellow at the European Southern Observatory in Germany, and a postdoc at the University of Oxford. His work aims to improve our ability to observe the atmospheres of extrasolar planets.