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| Colorful Glimpses of Alien Worlds -- detecting exoplanets with precision radial velocity spectroscopy |
| Gabor Furesz |
| Thursday, Nov 10, 2011 at 8:00 PM |
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| Are there habitable worlds other than our own? This is an
age-old question that extends far beyond astronomy and science. Finding
Earth-twins has become one of the most important goals in astronomy, and
within reach of our generation.
NASA's highly successful Kepler mission is providing hundreds of possible
exoplanet candidates through the transit method. But not all of those
miniature stellar eclipses are due to real planets. The final
confirmation comes from spectroscopy.
In my talk I will give a short summary about the current state of
exoplanet research, followed by a brief introduction to spectroscopy. I
will cover both the instrumentation side and the scientific methods
used for analyzing the data. Through well-illustrated slides I talk
about the design challenges an instrument builder faces when trying to
detect an Earth-twin around another Solar-like star. This will take us to
the near future, the era of the Giant Magellan Telescope for what the CfA
is designing a 'planet-hunter' spectrograph called G-CLEF, that hopefully
can help us decipher the music of heavenly worlds...
Speaker Bio
Gabor Furesz is an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics,
being involved in numerous instrumentation projects since he joined CfA
in 2003 as a pre-doctoral fellow. His main interest over the years remained in
spectrograph design and exoplanet research. As his thesis project Gabor
built an instrument for a 1.5m telescope that has become the workhorse
instrument in the ground support follow up observations for the Kepler
mission. He also played crucial role in the commissioning of Hectochelle
for the 6.5m MMT, which instrument can record the spectra of 240 objects
Recently Gabor worked as the Instrument Scientist on the G-CLEF
conceptual study, that is a 25 metric ton planet hunter machine with a
proposed budget of $25M dollars for the 25m Giant Magellan Telescope.
We are thankful for Dr.Furesz being willing to give his talk on short notice.
Our previously scheduled speaker, Prof. Chris Stubbs, whose talk was described
in the November Star Trails, is dealing with an unexpected family medical crisis
for the next few weeks. He hopes to reschedule his talk for a future date.
Please join us for a pre-meeting dinner discussion at Changsho, 1712 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA at 6:00pm before the meeting. |
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