Exoplanets
Benjamin Pope
Slides available at
benjaminpope.github.io/talks/exoplanets/exoplanets.html
Who am I?
Undergrad, Honours Sydney Uni 2009–2012
- in physics
- ... + Latin, philosophy, maths
Exchange at the University of California, Berkeley (San Francisco)
- You should consider exchange too!
Doctorate at Balliol College, Oxford 2013–2017
- Detecting planets with the Kepler Space Telescope
Postdoc at New York University 2017–2020
- In data science and physics departments
- More Kepler work, imaging planets, radio stars
Lecturer at the University of Queensland 2021–2024
- James Webb Space Telescope image processing
Associate Professor at Macquarie University now
- in Data Science!
Planets
Is Pluto a planet?
More planets are being discovered all the time!
'A planet is an end product of disk accretion around a primary star or substar.'
I prefer this! More inclusive!
History
"There are countless suns and countless earths all rotating around their suns in exactly the same way as the seven planets of our system.
The countless worlds in the universe are no worse and no less inhabited than our Earth." (quoted in Kasting 2010.
Poorly received in Oxford:
"he vndertooke among very many other matters to set on foote the opinion of Copernicus, that the earth did goe round, and the heavens did stand still; wheras in truth it was his owne head which rather did run round, & his braines did not stand stil"
Received even worse in Rome!
Thomas Wright, An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe (1750)
Swedenborg-Kant-Laplace "Urnebel" hypothesis
...and now we have seen them! (eg HL Tau)
Pulsar planets! Wolszczan & Frail (1992)
Number of known exoplanets double every 27 months
Radial Velocity
The first exoplanet: 51 Pegasi b, Mayor & Queloz (1995)
Nobel Prize in 2019: Mayor & Queloz for 51 Peg b discovery
Transits
Exoplanet-style transit light curve of Venus from James Gilbert on Vimeo.
My first planet: EPIC 212521166 b!
Transmission Spectroscopy
Zafar Rustamkulov
JWST
Microlensing
Astrometry
Toliman Space Telescope
Early pupil design & simulation
TOLIMAN lab test phase mask
Direct Imaging
JWST Interferometer
Radio
Total: ?
The LOw Frequency Aperture Array (LOFAR) in the Netherlands has been surveying the northern sky.
GJ 1151
The Future
The European Extremely Large Telescope will do direct imaging and RV!
The Roman Space Telescope will directly image planets!
The Square Kilometre Array will detect hundreds of planets in the radio!