Special Seminar: Exoplanets: From Kepler/K2 to TESS, and What Comes Next

Speaker: 
Ian Crossfield
Institution: 
UC Santa Cruz
Date: 
Tuesday, February 21, 2017
Time: 
4:00 pm
Location: 
NS2 1201
 

 
ABSTRACT:
Kepler's four-year transit survey transformed our understanding of exoplanet demographics. Using the repurposed Kepler spacecraft, the ongoing K2 mission provides a natural transition from Kepler to the imminent all-sky TESS survey.   For the past three years I have led a large, multi-institutional team using UCO facilities to discover, follow up, validate, and characterize hundreds of new candidates and planets using data from K2 and to prepare for TESS. I will highlight some of our key results from the first two years of K2 data, including new multi-planet systems, a dramatic expansion of the mass-radius diagram for small exoplanets, and high-priority new targets for atmospheric characterization with HST and JWST. I will conclude by summarizing what these efforts suggest in the context of TESS follow-up with the APF and Keck, and the path forward to future exoplanet discovery and characterization in the era of JWST, TMT, and beyond. 
 

 
Host: 
Michael Cooper