What's Next for Super-Earths? Population Demographics To Probabilistic Planetary Physics

Event Date:
2019-03-11T15:00:00
2019-03-10T16:00:00
Event Location:
Hennings 318
Speaker:
Angie Wolfgang (Penn State)
Related Upcoming Events:
Astronomy Colloquia
Intended Audience:
Undergraduate
Local Contact:

Brett Gladman

Event Information:

The number of detected small extrasolar planets has increased a hundred-fold in the last decade, thanks in no small part to the Kepler Mission.  With TESS, CHEOPS, PLATO, WFIRST, and many next-generation radial velocity instruments to come, our understanding of planets smaller than Neptune will continue to be driven by observations.  As theorists construct origin stories for the enormous diversity of exoplanet properties and system architectures, they need population demographers such as myself to provide them with a coherent picture of the Galactic exoplanet census, through quantitative and careful syntheses of many individual measurements made with different detection methods.  I will present some of my work towards this goal, detailing in particular the latest developments in the super-Earth mass-radius distribution and the corresponding diversity of bulk planet compositions.  Through these efforts, I have started developing a framework which will enable us to make self-consistent, integrated probabilistic statements about population-level planetary physics.

Add to Calendar 2019-03-11T15:00:00 2019-03-10T16:00:00 What's Next for Super-Earths? Population Demographics To Probabilistic Planetary Physics Event Information: The number of detected small extrasolar planets has increased a hundred-fold in the last decade, thanks in no small part to the Kepler Mission.  With TESS, CHEOPS, PLATO, WFIRST, and many next-generation radial velocity instruments to come, our understanding of planets smaller than Neptune will continue to be driven by observations.  As theorists construct origin stories for the enormous diversity of exoplanet properties and system architectures, they need population demographers such as myself to provide them with a coherent picture of the Galactic exoplanet census, through quantitative and careful syntheses of many individual measurements made with different detection methods.  I will present some of my work towards this goal, detailing in particular the latest developments in the super-Earth mass-radius distribution and the corresponding diversity of bulk planet compositions.  Through these efforts, I have started developing a framework which will enable us to make self-consistent, integrated probabilistic statements about population-level planetary physics. Event Location: Hennings 318