Over the past thirty years, astronomers have made extraordinary progress in detecting planets around other stars. We now know that stars commonly host planets with a wider range of physical properties and system architectures than exist in our own solar system, and that planets likely outnumber stars in our galactic neighborhood. Now, planet detection technologies have advanced to the point that NASA is developing a flagship mission called the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO, expected launch ~2040) with the goal of searching for signs of life in the atmospheres of Earth-like exoplanets. However, before we can carry out these observations and confidently identify biosignature gases in the atmospheres of exoplanets, we must significantly improve our understanding of our nearest planetary neighbors. In this talk, I will describe work to fill in these knowledge gaps by developing new tools and methods to detect and characterize terrestrial exoplanets. I will show how planetary accretion onto white dwarf stars can reveal the geology of extrasolar planets and I will present a new automated technique for extracting this information. I will also show how modern artificial intelligence techniques can help measure precisely how common Earth analogs are, a crucial input parameter for designing missions like the HWO. And finally, I will discuss pathways towards characterizing the systems that HWO will target, including machine-learning methods to mitigate stellar activity in radial velocity observations, which currently limits our sensitivity to Earth-mass exoplanets.

Speaker: Andrew Vanderburg (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

All 2024 Spring Colloquium talks are held on Wednesdays at 3:00 PM. This colloquium is hosted by STScI and will be held as an in-person and virtual event.

You may join in person at STScI’s John N. Bahcall Auditorium or virtually on STScI's Live Science Events Facebook page.

Please direct questions or comments to contact above. The 2024 Spring Colloquium Committee members are: Joel Green (STScI), Matilde Mingozzi (STScI), Nashwan Sabti (JHU), Kevin Schlaufman (JHU), Ethan Vishniac (JHU), John Wu (STScI).