Found 36 talks width keyword exoplanets

En los ultimos años hemos visto el desarrollo de instrumentación para la búsqueda de exoplanetas por el método de la Velocidad Radial.

La tendencia es que cada generación de espectrógrafos ultra-estables sea un orden de magnitud mejor que la anterior. Pero ¿qué tienen en común estos intrumentos?, ¿Qué los distingue del resto?

El IAC participa en instrumentos de tres generacines: HARPS3, ESPRESSO y HIRES; en esta charla, aprovechando la experiencia adquirida, se hablará de las estrategias que han permitido a estos instrumentos tener alta resolución, alta estabilidad y alta repetibilidad.

The search for extrasolar planets is one of the fastest-growing fields of astronomy. This rapid growth was both made possible by the development of instrumentation and motivated it, creating a virtuous cycle that impacted positively several fields of research.

In this talk I will present the latest planet-hunting spectrograph ESPRESSO, installed at ESO's VLT. Targeting a radial velocity precision of 10 cm/s, ESPRESSO has the declared goal of detecting an Earth-mass planet inside the habitable zone of a main-sequence dwarf star. I will discuss the first results, ongoing campaigns, and reveal a bit of what the future holds for us.

Stellar magnetic activity generates astrophysical noise on the collected data in the quest for what might be called Earth 2.0. This noise poses obstacles and difficulties in the detection and accurately determining small-sized exoplanets properties. Characterising the relation between stellar photometric variability and radial velocity jitter can help us to define optimal observational strategies, and also to better model and mitigate the activity noise. Moreover, stellar activity will remain as one of the biggest challenges in detecting and assessing the exoplanetary atmosphere’s signal, even in the era of upcoming missions. I will present the current view of the intricate relationship between exoplanets and activity, discuss some of the latest developments, and show some of our first results.

Atmospheric compositions can provide powerful diagnostics of formation and migration histories of planetary systems. In this talk, I will present the results of our latest survey of atmospheric compositions focused on atmospheric abundances of H2O, Na, and K. We employ a sample of 19 exoplanets spanning from cool mini-Neptunes to hot Jupiters, with equilibrium temperatures between ~300 and 2700 K. We employ the latest transmission spectra, new H2 broadened opacities of Na and K, and homogeneous Bayesian retrievals. We confirm detections of H2O in 14 planets and detections of Na and K in 6 planets each. Among our sample, we find a mass-metallicity trend of increasing H2O abundances with decreasing mass, spanning generally substellar values for gas giants and stellar/superstellar for Neptunes and mini-Neptunes. However, the overall trend in H2O abundances, is significantly lower than the mass-metallicity relation for carbon in the solar system giant planets and similar predictions for exoplanets. On the other hand, the Na and K abundances for the gas giants are stellar or superstellar, consistent with each other, and generally consistent with the solar system metallicity trend. The H2O abundances in hot gas giants are likely due to low oxygen abundances relative to other elements rather than low overall metallicities, and provide new constraints on their formation mechanisms. Our results show that the differing trends in the abundances of species argue against the use of chemical equilibrium models with metallicity as one free parameter in atmospheric retrievals, as different elements can be differently enhanced.

Zoom link: https://rediris.zoom.us/j/92734027825

Breakthrough Starshot is an initiative by the Breakthrough Foundation to prove ultra-fast ultra-light nanospacecraft can be launched by laser radiation pressure to nearby stars, and will lay the foundations for a first launch to Alpha Centauri within the next generation. Designs for a 0.2c Alpha Centauri mission minimize beam director capital cost by accelerating a ~4 m, several gram diameter sailcraft for ~10 min. A number of hard engineering challenges remain to be solved before these missions can become a reality: Large coherent laser arrays are required. No consensus has been reached on the most suitable sail geometry for stable flight, “beam-riding”. The sail itself requires major advances in materials science and photonic design to produce materials with the required absorptance, emittance, reflectance, areal density and operating temperature. Along the way, the project will enable increasingly fast outer solar system and interstellar precursor missions. Breakthrough Starshot will pave the way for multi-lightyear pipelines of sailcraft that fly past each target star every few weeks. Beams such as Starshot will produce an extremely observable transient feature of Earth and therefore could be an observable of extraterrestrial advanced civilizations.

Planetary transits have proven to be one of the most efficient means of finding planets outside the Solar system, counting over 2500 exoplanet discoveries. These transiting planets are paramount for the study of exoplanet atmospheres as the stellar light is filtered through the planetary atmosphere during transit and planetary absorption signatures become imprinted on the stellar spectrum. Observations of hot-Jupiter transmission spectra have become increasingly numerous and reliable throughout recent years, allowing detailed constrains on the planet's physical and chemical atmospheric properties, interactions between planet and host star, and planet formation history. While early work relied largely on space-based facilities, ground-based techniques have seen major advances recently and have become instrumental in performing an extensive and comparative study of exoplanet atmospheres. I will review the current state of knowledge, summarize recent results and discuss future prospects of exoplanet characterization, with a focus on the potential of ground-based facilities. In particular, I will present recent and new results by our team on the transmission spectra of hot Jupiters.

One of the most exciting possibilities enabled by transiting exoplanets is to measure their atmospheric properties through the technique of transmission spectroscopy: the variation of the transit depth as a function of wavelength due to starlight interacting with the atmosphere of the exoplanet. Motivated by the need of optical transmission spectra of exoplanets, we recently launched the Arizona-CfA-Católica Exoplanet Spectroscopy Survey (ACCESS), which aims at studying the atmospheres of ~20 exoplanets ranging from super-Earths to hot-Jupiters in the entire optical atmospheric window using ground-based facilities. In this talk, I will present the survey, the astrostatistical challenges it poses and first results.

 A comprehensive understanding of sub-stellar objects (brown dwarfs and extrasolar giant planets) and their population characteristics (e.g. IMF, formation history) is only possible through the robust interpretation of ultra-cool objects spectroscopy. However, the physics of ultra-cool atmospheres is complicated by a variety of challenging ingredients (dust properties, non-equilibrium chemistry, molecular opacities). Moreover, while hydrogen-burning stars stabilize on the stellar main-sequence, sub-stellar objects continuously cool down (since they lack an internal source of energy) and evolve towards later spectral types. Their atmospheric parameters are a strong function of age. In this talk I will present the spectroscopic analysis of a large sample of L and T dwarfs, complementing the spectroscopic data with astrometry from the PARSEC program, in order to constrain the sub-stellar initial mass function and formation history. I will then describe our new effort to identify and characterize a large sample of benchmark systems, combining Gaia capabilities with large area near-infrared surveys such as UKIDSS, SDSS, and VVV, in order to calibrate effectively the theoretical models.
    

Direct imaging of wide planetary mass companions provide a unique opportunity to fully characterize their spectroscopic and photometric properties. They share similar physical properties to gas giant exoplanets found by radial velocity and transit techniques, with overlapping temperatures in the range of ~1000–1500K and masses from a few to a dozen Jupiter masses. We have recently identified a young L-type companion at ~100 AU of a previously unrecognized M dwarf. We determined the parallactic distance of the system of 12.7 ± 1.0 pc. By comparison with evolutionary models we derived a mass of 73 (+20, -15) MJup for the primary, at around the substellar mass limit and 11.2 (+9.7, -1.8) MJup for the secondary, near the deuterium burning mass limit. In this talk I will present the properties of the two components of this new pair and discuss the possibilities for future thorough characterization.

Detection and characterisation of weak periodic signals from noisy time series is a common problem in many different fields of astrophysics. Here I detail one approach for testing whether a signal with roughly known characteristics exists in the data, using a search of secondary eclipses from Kepler-observed photometric time series as an example. The method is based on Bayesian model selection and uses Gaussian processes to model the stochastic variability in the data in non-parametric fashion.