April 26th, 2014
with Dr. Sasha Hinkley – Caltech
Most of the hundreds of extrasolar planets identified in the past 15 years have been detected indirectly through careful monitoring of the planets’ effect on their host star’s light. By overcoming the extremely large brightness ratio between the stars and their faint exoplanetary companions, we are now able to actually image wide-separation exoplanets using large ground-based observatories such as Palomar. Sasha will describe efforts spanning two hemispheres to implement a new generation of astronomical instruments at observatories like Palomar dedicated to this task. These instrumentation platforms will allow us to extract detailed spectroscopic information about exoplanets, providing insight into the atmospheric chemistries, compositions, and thermodynamic properties of these objects.
